Product design question
Design Netflix for Senior Citizens (Goal: Increase engagement time).
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a specific, underserved user segment with distinct usability needs, tied to a clearly stated business goal.
How to approach it
- Identify senior-specific pain points: small text and complex navigation, difficulty discovering new content versus rewatching familiar favorites, and unfamiliarity with gesture-based controls.
- Design around discoverability of the familiar: a 'classic favorites' and nostalgia-driven recommendation rail, since seniors often prefer known content over algorithmic novelty.
- Simplify navigation: larger text/icon mode and voice-search as a primary input method, reducing reliance on precise touch gestures.
- Consider a social angle: a simple 'watch party' or shared-viewing feature with family, since engagement time often rises when tied to social connection for this demographic.
- Define success as the stated goal, engagement time, measured via average session length and sessions per week for the senior user segment specifically.
What a strong answer includes
- Directly targets usability barriers specific to seniors (text size, gesture complexity) instead of generic accessibility platitudes.
- Proposes nostalgia-based content surfacing, a genuine insight about senior viewing preference for familiar content over discovery-driven browsing.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume seniors currently rewatch the same 5 shows 80% of the time, motivating a stronger 'continue watching classics' rail.
- Ties every proposed feature back to the explicitly stated goal, increasing engagement time, rather than drifting into unrelated ideas.
Common mistakes
- Proposing only surface-level accessibility fixes like bigger fonts without addressing content discovery and navigation complexity.
- Losing sight of the stated goal, engagement time, and proposing features unrelated to it.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate these design choices with actual senior users?
- How would you measure whether the watch-party feature increases engagement versus just adding complexity?
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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