Product design question
Design an expense management system.
- Microsoft
- 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.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
B2B product design for an internal workflow tool with an approval chain and three distinct personas.
How to approach it
- Clarify SMB employee expense reporting versus personal finance tracking; confirm with the interviewer.
- Identify users: employees submitting expenses, managers approving, and finance reconciling against policy.
- Surface pain points: manual receipt entry, unclear policy limits, and slow approval turnaround.
- Prioritize receipt capture and automatic policy checks first, the highest-friction, highest-error step.
- Propose an MVP: photo-to-line-item OCR, automatic policy flagging for over-limit spend, and one-tap manager approval.
- Define success as average days from submission to reimbursement and percent auto-approved without manual review.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly separates the three personas and designs for each rather than treating it as one flow.
- Names OCR receipt capture as the highest-leverage feature, with a concrete before and after, cutting entry time from five minutes to thirty seconds.
- Flags policy-compliance auto-flagging as a finance-side value driver, not just employee convenience.
Common mistakes
- Designing only the employee submission flow and ignoring manager or finance needs.
- No mention of policy enforcement, a core reason companies buy this software.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle expenses in different currencies?
- What would you do about employees who consistently violate policy?
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