Product design question
How would you improve the search for charities on Bing?
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement for a narrow, trust-sensitive vertical search use case within a general search engine.
How to approach it
- Segment on donors researching where to give, the primary user for charity search, distinct from someone searching for volunteer opportunities.
- Identify the pain point: hard to quickly verify a charity's legitimacy and how much of a donation actually reaches its cause.
- Propose a charity verification panel in search results showing registered nonprofit status, an overhead or program-spending ratio, and links to rating sources like Charity Navigator.
- Add a comparison view for charities within the same cause area, helping donors choose between similar options.
- Define success as click-through to verified charity sites and, if trackable through partners, an increase in completed donations.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the real trust gap, verifying legitimacy and spending ratios, instead of a generic better-search-results answer.
- Grounds the design in a real existing data source, Charity Navigator, showing feasibility without inventing new infrastructure.
- Adds a comparison feature that matches how donors actually decide between similar charities.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic search ranking improvements without addressing the trust and verification gap specific to charity search.
- Ignoring how to source and keep verification data accurate and current.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep charity verification data accurate and up to date?
- How would you prevent this from being gamed by less legitimate organizations?
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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