Product design question
How will you design to reduce the storage space of a mobile phone?
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a systems-level constraint (storage), requiring the candidate to identify what actually consumes space and design around user behavior, not just settings.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: OS-level storage management, or a specific app's storage footprint, since the design differs.
- Identify what actually consumes storage: photos and videos (usually the largest share), app caches, and duplicate or forgotten downloads.
- Segment users into those who never manage storage until it's full, and power users who proactively clean up.
- Design for the first, larger group: a proactive, one-tap cleanup suggestion (e.g., duplicate photos, large unused apps, old chat media) surfaced before storage runs out, not just a manual settings menu.
- Add smart offloading, such as auto-backing up and compressing photos to the cloud while keeping thumbnails locally.
- Define success as reduced full-storage complaints and support tickets, and increased use of the cleanup suggestion.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real storage hogs, photos, video, and cache, rather than treating this as a generic settings redesign.
- Designs for the majority of users who never proactively manage storage, not just the power-user segment who already know how.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume photos and videos account for 60% of used storage on the median phone.
- Proposes cloud offloading with local thumbnails as a concrete mechanism, not just delete suggestions.
Common mistakes
- Proposing only a manual settings page, which most users never open until it's too late.
- Not identifying what actually consumes the most space before designing the fix.
- Ignoring the risk of deleting something a user still needs, like the wrong duplicate photo.
Likely follow-up questions
- How do you handle a user who deletes something by mistake?
- How would you build the duplicate-detection logic?
- What's the trade-off between local storage and cloud dependency?
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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