Product design question
How would you increase sales at Amazon?
- Amazon
- Product design
- Hard
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
Broad strategic thinking on a mature e-commerce business: can you prioritize a specific lever instead of listing every possible growth idea.
How to approach it
- Break the problem into levers: more buyers (acquisition), more frequent purchases (retention and frequency), and higher order value (cross sell and upsell).
- Assess which lever has the most headroom, assume acquisition growth has slowed given Amazon's already massive reach, so frequency and average order value likely offer more near term upside.
- Prioritize personalized recommendations and bundling to lift average order value, since Amazon already has strong purchase history data to power this.
- Add a second lever, faster and more predictable delivery in underserved regions, since delivery speed is a proven driver of purchase frequency on Amazon specifically.
- State the trade off, investing in personalization versus logistics, and recommend prioritizing personalization first since it is faster to iterate on than physical infrastructure.
- Define success as average order value and purchase frequency per active customer, tracked together to avoid gaming one at the expense of the other.
What a strong answer includes
- Breaks the vague question into concrete levers instead of answering with a scattershot list of ideas.
- Picks a specific lever with reasoning, personalization and AOV, tied to Amazon's actual data advantage.
- Tracks two metrics together to avoid a one sided optimization that looks good but is not.
Common mistakes
- Listing many disconnected ideas (ads, Prime, logistics, marketing) with no prioritization or reasoning.
- Ignoring that Amazon's acquisition growth is likely more saturated than frequency or order value growth.
Likely follow-up questions
- Why prioritize AOV over pure acquisition growth?
- How would you measure if personalization is actually driving incremental sales, not just pulling forward existing intent?
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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