Product design question
How will you design a streaming service product that can cater to customers in the US and Canada assuming they have different needs?
- ViacomCBS
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Localization and market segmentation thinking, checking whether you can identify real, specific differences between two seemingly similar markets rather than treating them as one.
How to approach it
- Clarify the assumption: US and Canadian streaming audiences differ in content preferences, like stronger demand for local Canadian content and French-language programming in Quebec.
- Identify licensing and regulatory differences: Canadian content quotas and CRTC regulations may require different content sourcing and labeling than the US market.
- Prioritize content localization over UI differences, since content availability and language support drive subscription decisions more than interface tweaks.
- Propose a design: region-specific content libraries with clear Canadian content highlighting, full French-language support for Quebec audiences, and pricing reflecting currency and local market conditions.
- Address a secondary need: local payment methods and currency display, since cross-border pricing assumptions can create friction at checkout.
- Define success as subscription conversion rate improvement in Canada specifically, tracked separately from the broader US market to isolate the impact of localization.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a specific, real difference, Canadian content regulations and Quebec's French-language market, rather than assuming the two markets are interchangeable.
- Prioritizes content and language localization over surface-level UI changes, correctly identifying the higher-leverage lever.
- Tracks Canada-specific conversion separately, isolating the localization effort's actual impact rather than blending it into aggregate North American metrics.
Common mistakes
- Treating the US and Canada as functionally identical markets needing only currency conversion, missing real regulatory and language differences.
- Focusing on UI differences instead of the more impactful content licensing and language localization needs.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle content licensing differences between the two countries technically?
- How would you prioritize French-language support against the overall product roadmap?
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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