Product design question
How would you go about implementing notifications for a logistics company?
- Affirm
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a B2B notification system, requiring the candidate to prioritize actionability and relevance over simply broadcasting more alerts.
How to approach it
- Clarify the audience: shippers tracking their own cargo, or the logistics company's internal operations team, since notification needs differ.
- Segment shipper needs: routine on-schedule shipments needing minimal updates versus at-risk shipments needing proactive, detailed alerts.
- Identify the core design problem: too many low-value status updates cause notification fatigue, so recipients start ignoring alerts, including truly urgent ones.
- Propose exception-based notifications by default: alert users primarily when a shipment deviates from its expected schedule or route, with routine on-time updates available on-demand rather than pushed.
- Add actionability: each alert should include a clear next step or contact option, not just a status update with no path to resolve an issue.
- Define success as reduced notification opt-out or mute rate and faster response time to at-risk shipment alerts.
What a strong answer includes
- Prioritizes exception-based alerts over blanket status updates, directly addressing the real risk of notification fatigue in operational tooling.
- Distinguishes shipper-facing needs from internal operations needs, tailoring notification design to each.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume 90% of shipments proceed on schedule, so alerting on all of them dilutes attention from the 10% that actually need action.
- Requires every alert to include a next step, addressing a common flaw where notifications inform but don't help resolve anything.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to notify on every status change, which causes fatigue and reduces attention to truly urgent alerts.
- Not distinguishing shipper-facing notifications from internal operational ones.
- Designing alerts that report a problem without offering any actionable next step.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you let users customize their notification thresholds?
- How would you measure notification fatigue directly?
- What channel, push, SMS, or email, would you prioritize for urgent alerts?
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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