Product design question
How would you improve Gmail?
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Product sense: identifying a real user pain point in a mature product and proposing a focused improvement.
How to approach it
- Pick a user segment, such as people managing high email volume across work and personal accounts, rather than 'all Gmail users.'
- Identify their top pain point, like re-finding an old email or triaging a full inbox quickly.
- Prioritize one problem to solve, weighing impact (how many users hit it) against effort to build.
- Propose a specific solution, such as smarter auto-categorization or a one-tap unsubscribe-and-archive action.
- Define a success metric, like time to inbox zero or reduction in manual filing actions.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a specific segment, e.g. professionals juggling 200+ emails a day, instead of a generic improvement for everyone.
- Proposes a concrete feature, like an AI-suggested reply queue for low-priority threads, not just 'better search.'
- Gives an illustrative metric, e.g. cutting average inbox processing time by 20%, clearly marked as an assumption.
- Considers the trade-off of adding complexity to a product many people value for its simplicity.
Common mistakes
- Listing many small tweaks instead of picking one and going deep.
- Ignoring that Gmail already ships strong search and categorization, so the idea must be genuinely additive.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate this pain point exists before building?
- What would you cut from Gmail to keep it simple?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
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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