Product design question
How would you improve Amazon Photos?
- Amazon
- Product design
- Easy
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 improvement thinking for a niche photo storage product, checking you can find a real differentiation angle against Google Photos and iCloud.
How to approach it
- Clarify what problem to focus on, organization, discovery, or storage value, since Amazon Photos competes in a crowded space dominated by Google Photos.
- Identify the target user, likely Prime members who get free storage but rarely open the app, since awareness and habit are bigger problems than feature gaps.
- List pain points: low awareness that Prime includes unlimited photo storage, weak search and organization compared to Google Photos, and no compelling reason to open the app regularly.
- Propose the design: smarter auto-generated highlights or memories tied to Prime shopping moments, like a trip, paired with a stronger awareness push through the main Amazon app.
- Prioritize the awareness and habit-forming angle first, since Amazon's real edge is a captive Prime user base that mostly doesn't know or use this benefit.
- Define success as monthly active users among Prime members and photo upload retention, confirming scope on whether this includes new AI features.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies awareness and habit, not feature gaps, as the sharper problem, since most Prime members likely don't know they have this free storage.
- Proposes a concrete distribution lever, surfacing Amazon Photos within the main Amazon shopping app at a relevant moment, leveraging Amazon's real advantage over standalone competitors.
- Names Google Photos as the explicit competitive benchmark and states where Amazon Photos would need to close a real gap, like search quality.
- Sets a measurable success metric, active usage among eligible Prime members, tied directly to the identified awareness problem.
Common mistakes
- Proposing feature parity fixes with Google Photos without addressing the more fundamental awareness gap.
- Not acknowledging Amazon's distribution advantage through the Prime membership and main shopping app.
- Ignoring the competitive benchmark entirely.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure whether low usage is due to awareness or product quality?
- What's the risk of over-promoting this feature within the main Amazon app?
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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