AI & Technical question

How would you design the technical aspect of location sharing in Google Maps?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Technical product design skill for a real-time, privacy-sensitive feature, addressing data flow, latency, and battery constraints.

Clarify the use case, sharing live location with a specific contact for safety or coordination, time-limited and revocable.
Design the data flow, the sharer's device periodically sends location updates to a backend service, which pushes updates to the viewer's device.
Address update frequency and battery tradeoff, e.g. updating every few seconds while the app is active versus less frequently in the background to save power.
Design the permission model, explicit opt-in, a visible indicator while sharing is active, and an easy one-tap stop.
Address technical constraints, using push notifications or a persistent connection for near real-time delivery without draining battery.
Define success metrics, location update latency and battery consumption per hour of active sharing, alongside a low disable rate.

Explicitly weighs the battery versus real-time accuracy tradeoff, a genuine technical constraint for continuous location updates.
Designs a clear, visible consent and stop mechanism, since location sharing is a sensitive privacy feature.
Names a concrete technical mechanism, push-based updates versus polling, showing real understanding of mobile data delivery tradeoffs.
Sets a technical success metric, update latency, alongside a trust metric, like ease of disabling sharing.

Ignoring battery drain as a real constraint on continuous location updates.
Designing a location sharing feature with no clear way to stop or see who has access.
Treating this as a purely UI question without addressing the backend data flow.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.