Product design question
How would you increase user engagement on Microsoft OneDrive?
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement thinking for a mature product, checking you can find a specific engagement lever rather than a generic feature list.
How to approach it
- Clarify what engagement means here, likely active file access, sharing, and collaboration frequency rather than just login count.
- Identify the target segment most worth focusing on, for example users who store files but rarely share or collaborate, since that gap represents underused value.
- List pain points: low awareness of collaboration features, friction in sharing outside an organization, and competition from Google Drive and Dropbox habits.
- Propose a design: smarter default prompts that surface collaboration opportunities at natural moments, like after uploading a file others might need.
- Prioritize the sharing and collaboration prompt over general UI polish, since collaborative use is what typically drives habitual, sticky engagement.
- Define success as weekly active collaborators as a share of storage users, and confirm scope on whether this is consumer or enterprise OneDrive.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets a specific underused behavior, collaboration and sharing, rather than a vague 'make it more engaging' answer.
- Proposes a concrete, contextual nudge, a prompt after upload suggesting who else might need the file based on recent collaborators.
- Names competitive context explicitly, noting Google Drive's collaboration habit as the benchmark OneDrive needs to close the gap against.
- Sets a specific success metric, like the share of storage-only users converting to active collaborators, tied directly to the proposed feature.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI redesign ideas with no tie to a specific engagement behavior.
- Not distinguishing storage usage from collaboration usage as different engagement types.
- Ignoring the competitive context against Google Drive and Dropbox.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you avoid these prompts feeling like nagging notifications?
- What would you measure in the first month to know the nudge was working?
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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