Product design question
How would you reduce Gmail storage size?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a technical-feeling problem (storage) translated into user-facing value and clear tradeoffs.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal: reduce the storage footprint users hit against their quota, versus reduce Google's server-side storage cost, since these lead to different solutions.
- Propose a user-facing fix: a 'storage manager' view surfacing large attachments and old promotional emails with one-tap bulk delete/archive suggestions.
- Propose a system-side fix: more aggressive compression or deduplication of attachments sent to many recipients (e.g. a company-wide email with a large attachment).
- Consider a policy lever: auto-expiring low-value content like promotional email images after a set period, with user opt-out.
- Define success: average per-user storage freed and reduction in users hitting the free quota warning, not just total bytes saved.
What a strong answer includes
- Separates the user-value framing (freeing up quota, useful for the user) from the cost-saving framing (useful for Google), and addresses both explicitly.
- Proposes concrete mechanisms, bulk cleanup suggestions and attachment deduplication, rather than a vague 'compress better' answer.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume 60% of storage used is old promotional attachments, to justify a targeted cleanup feature over a blanket policy.
- Picks a user-centric success metric (quota-warning reduction) that ties storage savings back to actual user benefit.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to delete user content automatically without opt-in, which risks major trust and data-loss backlash.
- Framing this purely as a cost-cutting exercise without connecting it to a real user benefit.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle the risk of a user losing something important during auto-cleanup?
- How would you message this change so users don't feel Google is deleting their data without consent?
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More questions from Google
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