Product design question
How would you improve Trello?
- 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
Product improvement for a mature productivity tool: can you find a real workflow friction point (visual board scaling) rather than proposing generic new features.
How to approach it
- Define the user job: organize and track tasks visually, working well for small projects but often breaking down at scale.
- Identify the core pain point: Trello's board-based model gets cluttered and hard to navigate as the number of cards/lists grows, weakening its cross-project visibility.
- Propose a fix: better cross-board views and filtering (e.g. a unified view of a user's cards across multiple boards) without abandoning the simple card-based model that's Trello's strength.
- Consider automation: expand simple rule-based automation (like existing Butler) to reduce manual card-moving for repetitive workflows.
- Address reporting: lightweight built-in progress/velocity views for teams who currently export to other tools for reporting.
- Define success: reduced time spent manually organizing boards and increased usage among teams managing multiple boards.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real, well-known weakness, scaling/clutter as projects grow, rather than proposing unrelated new features.
- Proposes a fix that preserves Trello's core simplicity (card-based model) instead of over-complicating it with heavy project-management features.
- Builds on an existing real capability (Butler automation) rather than inventing something disconnected from the product.
- Chooses a metric tied to the actual pain point (time spent organizing) rather than generic engagement.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to turn Trello into a heavier project-management tool, undermining its core simplicity advantage.
- Ignoring the well-known scaling/clutter problem and proposing unrelated cosmetic features instead.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep Trello simple for new users while adding more power for advanced teams?
- How would you decide which automation rules to build first?
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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