Product design question
Design a refrigerator for offices.
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What this question tests
Product design for a shared physical space, checking whether you can balance competing user needs, hygiene, and space constraints in a realistic office setting.
How to approach it
- Define the users: multiple employees sharing one fridge, with competing needs around space, labeling, and food safety.
- Identify the core pain points: mystery unlabeled food, overcrowding, and expired items nobody throws out.
- Prioritize food safety and space fairness over aesthetics, since these are the most common office fridge complaints.
- Propose a design: modular labeled compartments per employee or team, a built-in expiration reminder system, and a clear-out schedule enforced by a simple app notification.
- Consider a smart element: a small display or app showing which items are nearing expiration, prompting owners to remove them before a scheduled Friday clear-out.
- Define success as reduced fridge complaints, faster item turnover, and adherence to the clear-out schedule.
What a strong answer includes
- Names food safety and fairness as the two dominant pain points, grounded in common office experience rather than generic appliance features.
- Proposes a specific mechanism, labeled compartments plus expiration reminders, rather than just 'make the fridge bigger'.
- Ties the design to a concrete process, a scheduled clear-out, which addresses the root cause of clutter rather than just capacity.
Common mistakes
- Focusing only on physical capacity and ignoring the social and hygiene problems that actually frustrate office fridge users.
- Proposing a purely tech-heavy solution, like cameras or AI food recognition, when a simple labeling and schedule system solves the real problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you enforce the clear-out policy without being annoying?
- How would this design differ for a small office of 10 versus a large office of 500?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
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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