Product design question
Design Microsoft Outlook.
- 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
Whether you can design a mature productivity product by identifying its most valuable, underserved user segment.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: redesigning core Outlook, or one specific workflow like triaging a high-volume inbox.
- Segment users: knowledge workers drowning in email volume versus casual users with light inboxes, since needs differ sharply.
- Identify the core pain point for heavy users: time spent triaging low-priority email before reaching what actually matters.
- Prioritize smart triage, ranking and bundling emails by sender importance and thread activity, as the highest-leverage improvement.
- Propose a concrete feature: an AI-assisted priority inbox view that surfaces action-needed emails first, with one-tap defer for the rest.
- Define success metrics: time to inbox zero and percent of important emails responded to within a day, with a guardrail on missed messages.
What a strong answer includes
- Narrows scope to a specific, high-value workflow, inbox triage for heavy users, instead of redesigning the whole product.
- Names a concrete mechanism, priority ranking by sender and thread activity, not just a vague smarter inbox claim.
- Gives an illustrative number, assuming heavy users spend 30 plus minutes a day triaging low-priority email today.
- Adds a guardrail, missed important messages, so triage automation doesn't hide things that actually mattered.
Common mistakes
- Redesigning Outlook's whole interface without identifying a specific, prioritized user pain point first.
- Proposing an AI feature with no guardrail against burying an important email a user actually needed to see.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you build trust that the AI triage isn't hiding something important?
- What would you measure to know the redesign actually saved users time?
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