Product design question
How would you improve Perplexity's Comet browser for daily use?
- Perplexity
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for daily-driver habits in a category, the browser, where switching costs and habit inertia are extremely high.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: someone who already has a default browser habit and needs a compelling reason to switch their daily driver, not just try Comet once.
- State the core pain point: existing browsers require manually searching, reading, and synthesizing across many tabs for everyday research and shopping tasks.
- Propose improvements to the assistant sidebar: proactive, context-aware suggestions based on the current page, like summarizing a long article or comparing prices across open tabs.
- Address performance and trust: ensure the AI layer never feels like it slows down basic browsing, since speed is a baseline expectation for a daily browser.
- Define success: percentage of users who set Comet as their default browser after a trial period, and daily session frequency versus their previous browser.
What a strong answer includes
- Focuses on proactive, contextual assistance tied to what the user is already doing, rather than a generic chat sidebar bolted onto a browser.
- Names a concrete daily-use scenario, comparing prices across open tabs, that shows clear value over a standard browser.
- Sets default-browser conversion as the real success metric, since trial usage without becoming the daily driver is not a win for a browser product.
- Flags baseline performance as non-negotiable, since any perceived slowdown will drive users back to their old browser regardless of AI features.
Common mistakes
- Proposing more AI features without addressing the baseline switching cost of changing a daily browser habit.
- Ignoring performance risk, since a laggy AI layer would undermine the core browsing experience.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would make a user revert to their old browser after trying Comet?
- How would you measure whether the AI features are actually driving the switch, versus other factors?
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More questions from Perplexity
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