Product design question
Design a washer and dryer.
- Product design
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product sense for a physical product, unusual for a software PM interview.
How to approach it
- Clarify the target segment: apartment dwellers with space constraints versus families with high laundry volume.
- Identify pain points: time spent monitoring cycles, space constraints, and energy and water cost.
- Propose a combined washer-dryer unit for small spaces with app-based cycle notifications and energy-efficient settings.
- Prioritize the space-constrained segment first, since it's underserved by standard full-size units.
- Define success as fewer forgotten or re-washed loads, or energy savings versus a standard unit.
- Note the engineering tradeoff between wash performance and energy efficiency.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks a clear segment, small-space urban dwellers, rather than designing a generic appliance for everyone.
- Names a real underserved need: a combined wash-dry unit for apartments without space for two machines.
- Adds a software layer, app notifications and remote start, appropriate for a PM interview even on a hardware product.
- Ties the success metric to a real behavior change, fewer forgotten loads, not just units sold.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as a pure hardware engineering question with no product or user framing.
- Designing for 'everyone' instead of a specific space or usage constraint.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you balance energy efficiency against wash performance?
- What would make a customer choose your design over an existing combo unit?
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
More questions from Google
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