Product design question
Design a spreadsheet for mobiles.
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests product design for adapting a dense, desktop-oriented tool to a small screen, requiring real trade-offs rather than shrinking the desktop UI.
How to approach it
- Clarify the primary mobile use case: quick data entry and viewing on the go, versus full complex formula building, since mobile likely can't replace desktop for the latter.
- Identify the core constraint: a full grid with dozens of visible columns and rows doesn't fit a phone screen, and touch input is imprecise for cell selection and formulas.
- Segment users: casual viewers checking a shared budget or tracker versus power users entering data or building formulas on the go.
- Design around the constraint: a card or single-column focused view for quick entry, with a separate, deliberate mode to access the full grid when precision is needed.
- Redesign formula input for touch: a guided formula builder with tap-to-select ranges instead of typing cell references manually.
- Define success as task completion rate for common mobile actions (viewing, quick edits) compared to abandonment on desktop-style dense grids.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real constraint, that a dense grid and typed formulas are fundamentally desktop-shaped interactions, rather than just scaling the UI down.
- Separates casual viewing from power editing as distinct mobile use cases needing different interfaces.
- Proposes a concrete alternative for formulas, tap-to-select ranges, addressing the specific touch-input problem rather than ignoring it.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume 70% of mobile sessions are quick views or edits, not new formula creation, justifying the focused view as the default.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to simply shrink the desktop grid UI without rethinking the interaction model for touch.
- Ignoring formula entry, which is uniquely hard on mobile and central to what makes a spreadsheet a spreadsheet.
- Not distinguishing casual viewers from power users needing different mobile experiences.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a formula referencing cells not currently visible on screen?
- What features would you deliberately leave out of the mobile version?
- How would you test whether users can still trust formula results entered on mobile?
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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