Product design question
How would you improve Amazon?
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product sense for a massive, mature e-commerce platform, picking one specific, real pain point rather than a scattershot list.
How to approach it
- Pick a specific user moment, a shopper trying to distinguish between many similar, low differentiation third party listings for the same product type.
- Identify the pain point, search results are cluttered with near identical listings of varying quality and trustworthiness, making decisions slow.
- Propose a fix, a compare these similar listings tool that surfaces the real differences, seller ratings, return policy, and price, side by side.
- Explain the business benefit, reduces decision paralysis and return rates from choosing a lower quality listing by mistake.
- Define the success metric, reduction in return rate for the targeted product category and increase in add to cart conversion from search results.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks one specific, real friction point, listing clutter and comparison difficulty, instead of a broad list of unrelated ideas across shipping, pricing, and UI.
- Proposes a concrete comparison feature, tying it to real signals like seller rating and return policy, not just price.
- Names a metric tied directly to the stated problem, return rate reduction in that category, showing the fix targets the actual harm identified.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic ideas like faster shipping with no specific mechanism or reasoning for why it is the top priority.
- No metric tied specifically to the stated pain point.
- Ignoring how this change would affect third party sellers, a key part of the marketplace.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent sellers from gaming this comparison feature?
- How would you prioritize this against other roadmap items competing for the same search real estate?
More product design questions
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- For a retail store, users are frequently complaining about long queues during check out. What strategy would you use to improve the experience in the short term and long term?Shopify · Product design · Medium
- Give an example of a badly designed product.Adobe · Product design · Easy
- Design a library for the future.Spotify · Product design · Hard
- Explain some new Alexa Skillsets you would roll out and why.Amazon · Product design · Medium
More questions from these companies
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