Product design question
How would you improve the Outlook app?
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What this question tests
Product design judgment on a mature productivity tool where the challenge is prioritizing among many possible improvements.
How to approach it
- Users: segment between heavy email power users managing hundreds of daily emails and light users who mainly check occasionally.
- Pain points: inbox overload and difficulty distinguishing important emails from noise, especially for power users.
- Prioritize: focus on triage speed for power users, the segment with the highest daily pain and business value.
- Solution: propose smarter, more transparent email prioritization, with clear reasoning shown for why an email was flagged important.
- Success metric: time to inbox zero, or percent reduction in time spent triaging daily email.
- Confirm scope: whether this targets individual users or enterprise IT-managed deployments, which changes rollout complexity.
What a strong answer includes
- Segments users by email volume, correctly identifying power users as the highest-value target for a triage improvement.
- Proposes a specific, buildable feature, transparent prioritization reasoning, rather than a vague AI magic fix.
- Sets a measurable outcome, time to inbox zero, tied directly to the pain point identified.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a broad redesign with no segmentation of user types.
- No specific mechanism for how prioritization would actually work or be explained to users.
- Vague success metric like user satisfaction with no measurement plan.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you build trust in an automated prioritization feature that users might not agree with?
- What would you measure to know power users trust the new triage system?
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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