Product design question
How would you you improve gmail's draft email functionality?
- 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 sense on a mature, well-understood feature.
How to approach it
- Clarify pain points with current drafts: getting lost across devices, no reminders, no cleanup.
- Pick a segment, e.g. users who write long emails and lose track of unfinished ones.
- Propose an AI-suggested continuation for a stalled draft, a 'needs attention' reminder after a few days, and reliable cross-device sync.
- Prioritize the stale-draft reminder first as low-effort, high-impact.
- Define success as percent of drafts eventually sent versus abandoned.
- Note how you'd A/B test the reminder to check it doesn't feel like nagging.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a specific pain point, drafts getting forgotten, instead of vague 'make it better'.
- Proposes a low-effort, high-impact fix first, a stale-draft reminder, rather than a big AI rebuild.
- Uses Gmail's existing AI writing assist as a natural extension for stalled drafts.
- Picks draft-to-sent conversion rate as the success metric, tying directly to the stated problem.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a full AI writing assistant without addressing the simpler abandonment problem.
- Giving no success metric tied back to the stated improvement.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you avoid the reminder feeling like nagging?
- What would you measure in an A/B test for this change?
More product design questions
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- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
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