Product design question
Design a product to compete with Slack.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Competitive strategy for a company that already has an adjacent product, Microsoft Teams, testing how to differentiate rather than copy.
How to approach it
- Acknowledge the real context: Microsoft already competes with Slack via Teams, so the answer should address differentiation, not building from zero.
- Identify Microsoft's advantage: deep bundling with Office 365 and enterprise IT relationships already in place at most large companies.
- Name Slack's advantage: a more polished, developer-friendly experience with a strong third party app ecosystem and integrations.
- Propose a focus area: deepen Teams' integration advantage further, for example seamless co-editing inside chat threads, leveraging Office apps in ways a standalone competitor like Slack cannot easily match.
- Prioritize this integration depth over trying to out-polish Slack's UI, since bundling and integration are Microsoft's actual structural advantage.
- Define success as Teams daily active usage growth among existing Office 365 seats, and message-to-file-collaboration conversion rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the answer in the real competitive landscape, Teams already exists and competes with Slack, rather than proposing a hypothetical new product.
- Identifies Microsoft's actual structural advantage, Office 365 bundling, and builds the strategy around doubling down on it.
- Picks a metric, conversion from chat to file collaboration, that reflects the specific integration advantage being pursued.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring that Microsoft Teams already exists and answering as if building a Slack competitor from scratch.
- Proposing to out-polish Slack's UI and ecosystem, which plays to Slack's strength rather than Microsoft's.
Likely follow-up questions
- Why has Teams not already fully displaced Slack despite this bundling advantage?
- How would you win over companies that are deeply invested in Slack's app ecosystem already?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve Microsoft OneNote?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve the MS Teams search functionality as a Search PM at Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you design a car sharing platform like Uber for disabled people?Lyft · Product design · Hard
More questions from Microsoft
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop