Product design question
How would you improve grammarly? Should Google acquire grammarly?
- Product design
- Hard
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 improvement reasoning combined with light M&A judgment for a real, well known SaaS writing tool.
How to approach it
- Identify the core users, students, professionals, and non native English writers needing writing assistance across many surfaces.
- Identify a real gap, weak context awareness, since tone suggestions do not fully adapt to the audience of an email versus a formal document.
- Propose a specific improvement, a tone or audience selector that tailors suggestions to who the reader is, not just generic grammar fixes.
- Address the acquisition question separately, assessing whether the writing assistance data and browser wide integration would meaningfully strengthen a large search or productivity company.
- Give a recommendation on the acquisition with a stated reason, weighing strategic fit against the company's existing scale and independence.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a concrete product gap, audience aware tone suggestions, rather than generic add more AI features.
- Separates the two parts of the question and answers both directly instead of only addressing improvement or acquisition.
- Gives a clear acquisition recommendation, leaning against it since the tool's value lies in being platform neutral, which an acquisition would undermine.
Common mistakes
- Answering only the improvement half and skipping the acquisition question, or the reverse.
- No specific product gap identified, just generic praise or criticism.
- Giving a yes or no on acquisition with no reasoning about strategic fit.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would the acquirer gain specifically from this data that it does not already have?
- How would you prioritize this tone feature against other roadmap items?
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