Product design question
How would you improve Google Maps?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product sense for a utility app: finding a genuine friction point rather than surface level polish.
How to approach it
- Pick a segment, for example daily commuters versus occasional road trippers, since their needs differ.
- Identify a pain point for commuters, such as inaccurate real time transit delay predictions.
- Prioritize accuracy of live data over new visual features, since trust in ETAs is the core value proposition.
- Propose partnering with transit agencies for richer real time feeds and showing confidence intervals on ETAs.
- Explain the user benefit: fewer missed connections and more trust in the app for daily use.
- Define success as reduction in ETA error and increase in transit mode selection within the app.
What a strong answer includes
- Focuses on one concrete segment, commuters, and their specific failure mode, missed transit connections.
- Ties the fix to data quality (transit feed accuracy) rather than a cosmetic UI change.
- Gives an illustrative number, e.g. assumes current ETA error is plus or minus 4 minutes and targets plus or minus 1.
- Notes a tradeoff: richer real time data costs more in agency partnerships and server compute.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI polish like a new color scheme instead of a functional improvement.
- Not naming a specific user segment or failure mode.
- Ignoring the cost or complexity of the proposed fix.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you improve ETA accuracy technically?
- What would you measure to prove this helped?
- How would you prioritize this against other Maps features?
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
More questions from Google
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