Product design question

Design a product to replace smartphones in 5-7 years.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Forward-looking product vision combined with grounded near-term feasibility, since 5 to 7 years is a real, bounded horizon.

Clarify the time horizon means near-term feasible technology, ruling out anything not plausible with current R and D trajectories.
Segment the core smartphone jobs to replace: communication, information access, payments, and camera, since a successor must cover these.
Identify the leading candidate technology: AI-powered smart glasses or wearables with voice and AR interfaces, already in active development.
Prioritize hands-free, glanceable information access as the core differentiator over the phone's screen-in-pocket model.
Design the solution: lightweight glasses with an AI assistant handling most tasks by voice or gesture, plus built-in payment and camera.
Define success: adoption and daily active usage among early adopters, and task completion rate versus a smartphone for core jobs.

Grounds the answer in real, currently emerging technology, AI glasses, rather than speculative science fiction, appropriate for the horizon.
Explicitly maps the new product against the smartphone's core jobs to be done, ensuring genuine replacement rather than a companion device.
Names the specific differentiator, hands-free and glanceable, as the reason this could actually displace phones.
Flags a realistic adoption barrier, social acceptance of wearing a camera and AI device, as part of the design.

Proposing unrealistic technology like brain implants that ignores the 5 to 7 year constraint.
Not mapping the new product against all core smartphone functions.
Ignoring social and privacy acceptance barriers to a wearable camera device.

What would be the biggest adoption barrier for this device?
How would you handle the privacy concerns of an always-on camera and microphone device?
What happens to the app ecosystem built around smartphones?