Product design question
How would you improve YouTube music?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement thinking for a specific, existing music product: identifying a real gap versus competitors and a focused improvement.
How to approach it
- Identify YouTube Music's current position: strong catalog via YouTube's video and remix content, weaker perceived personalization and curation compared to Spotify.
- Identify the pain point: discovery and personalized playlist quality lag behind competitors, especially for users switching from Spotify.
- Prioritize the fix: improve personalized playlist quality by better leveraging YouTube's unique data, such as watch history and comment engagement signals, not just listen history.
- Propose a concrete feature: a 'Mix' style playlist that blends official audio with live performances, covers, and remixes, YouTube's unique content advantage over pure audio services.
- Define an MVP: test the improved mix algorithm with a subset of users and compare playlist completion and skip rate against the current version.
- Define success: increase in playlist completion rate and session frequency for users exposed to the new personalization.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors the improvement in YouTube Music's actual differentiator, video-native content like live performances and remixes, rather than copying Spotify feature for feature.
- Uses YouTube's unique behavioral data (watch history, comments) as a personalization signal competitors do not have access to.
- Proposes a testable MVP (an improved mix feature tested against the current baseline) instead of a vague 'improve recommendations' statement.
- Chooses playlist completion and skip rate as measurable proxies for personalization quality.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic 'add more personalization' without naming a specific, testable mechanism.
- Ignoring YouTube Music's actual differentiator (video content) and just trying to copy Spotify.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you avoid cannibalizing YouTube's core video-watching behavior with a music-focused push?
- How would you measure whether users prefer this over Spotify specifically?
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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