Product design question
If Google has invented a way to make air travel 4x cheaper and 4x faster, what would you do with this technology?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests open-ended strategic product thinking for a hypothetical breakthrough, requiring the candidate to reason about second-order market effects, not just make-travel-cheaper thinking.
How to approach it
- Clarify the scenario: a 4x cost and speed improvement in air travel is transformative enough to reshape travel patterns, not just a minor product feature.
- Identify what becomes newly possible: routine long-distance commuting, same-day international business trips, and much broader access to travel for price-sensitive segments.
- Propose building a travel-booking and logistics platform, leveraging Google Flights and Maps, optimized for higher trip frequency and dynamic, commuter-style booking patterns.
- Identify the target user: price-sensitive frequent travelers and businesses newly able to justify same-day international trips, barely served by today's booking tools.
- Address second-order effects: massively increased flight volume strains airports and air traffic infrastructure, requiring capacity and regulatory partnerships, not just booking software.
- Define success: booking volume growth in the newly enabled high-frequency traveler segment, and partnership agreements securing capacity for the increased demand.
What a strong answer includes
- Reasons about the true scale of the change, a 4x shift enabling commuting-style travel, rather than treating it as a minor cost reduction.
- Grounds the product idea in Google's actual assets, Flights and Maps, rather than proposing to become an airline operator from scratch.
- Identifies a second-order infrastructure constraint, airport and air traffic capacity, that most candidates would miss.
- Names a specific target segment newly enabled by the breakthrough, rather than assuming existing travelers just fly more of the same trips.
Common mistakes
- Treating the shift as purely incremental, flights are now cheaper, missing the transformative, market-reshaping scale of a 4x change.
- Ignoring real-world infrastructure constraints like airport and air traffic capacity that would bottleneck this scenario.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this affect other forms of transportation like high-speed rail?
- What regulatory hurdles would be the biggest obstacle to this becoming real?
More product design questions
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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