Product design question
How would you improve the Drafts feature of your mail client?
- 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
Tests focused, incremental product improvement thinking on a narrow, well-defined feature.
How to approach it
- Identify the pain point: drafts pile up unsent, get lost, or are hard to resume with the original context.
- Segment users who draft-and-forget from those who draft intentionally to send later.
- Propose stale-draft nudges, prompting to send, discard or snooze after roughly 7 days.
- Add smart sorting by most-recently-edited rather than most-recently-created, and one-tap resume context.
- Define success as a reduction in drafts older than 30 days and an increase in draft-to-sent conversion rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Proposes a concrete, testable mechanism, a stale-draft nudge with a specific threshold, rather than vague make-it-easier language.
- Ties the metric directly to draft-to-sent conversion, the real underlying user goal.
- Addresses the resume-with-context problem specifically, not just visual polish.
Common mistakes
- Proposing UI polish only, like better icons, without addressing the behavioral problem of abandoned drafts.
- Giving no concrete success metric tied to actual sent-email behavior.
Likely follow-up questions
- What threshold would you use for a stale draft nudge, and how would you validate it?
- How would you avoid the nudge feeling naggy?
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