Product design question
How would you design an Apple Watch app for Tesla?
- Tesla
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design across a platform partnership constraint: can you design for a glanceable wrist form factor while respecting what Tesla's car already does well.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: a Tesla owner who wants quick, glanceable control and status without pulling out a phone, on a device with a tiny screen and short interactions.
- Identify pain points the phone app does not solve well: checking charge status at a glance, quickly locating the car, or pre-conditioning the cabin before walking out.
- Prioritize three to four core actions suited to a watch: charge status complication, remote climate pre-conditioning, car locator/honk, and lock/unlock via a single tap.
- Design around watch constraints: complications on the watch face for charge percentage, one-tap actions instead of multi-screen flows, and haptic confirmation instead of visual-only feedback.
- Consider the technical dependency: this requires Tesla's API access, so note the assumption that Tesla would need to support a native watchOS app (not guaranteed given Tesla's app strategy).
- Define success as daily active complication views and reduction in phone-app opens for quick status checks.
What a strong answer includes
- Narrows scope to glanceable, one-tap actions rather than porting the full Tesla app to a small screen.
- Uses the watch face complication as the primary interaction, since most watch value comes from ambient glances, not app opens.
- Flags the real-world constraint that Tesla currently favors phone and in-car software over third-party wearable integrations, and states this as an assumption to confirm.
- Ties success to reduced phone dependency for simple checks, a concrete and measurable proxy.
Common mistakes
- Designing a miniature version of the full car app instead of picking a few high-frequency actions.
- Ignoring battery and screen-size constraints unique to a watch.
- Not acknowledging that this depends on Tesla's willingness to build or open an API for it.
Likely follow-up questions
- Which single feature would you cut if you could only ship one at launch?
- How would you handle connectivity loss between the watch and the car?
- Would you prioritize Apple Watch or a Tesla-branded wearable, and why?
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More questions from Tesla
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