Product design question
If you wanted to create a 1-month MBA program, how would you think about structuring it?
- 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.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Tests product design for an ambitious educational program: prioritizing what to teach and how within a hard time constraint, and defining what success looks like.
How to approach it
- Clarify the target learner: likely working professionals seeking a career acceleration credential without a 2-year time or cost commitment.
- Identify the core value an MBA provides: strategic frameworks, leadership and communication skills, and a professional network, not just raw content volume.
- Prioritize ruthlessly given one month: focus on 3 to 4 high-leverage areas, such as strategy, finance fundamentals, leadership, and a capstone project, cutting anything not immediately applicable.
- Propose the structure: intensive daily sessions combining case studies, a real capstone project tied to the learner's own job, and peer cohort discussion for the network component.
- Address the credibility gap: partner with a recognized business school or bring in real practitioner instructors to give the compressed program legitimacy.
- Define success: completion rate, a real work outcome tied to the capstone (such as a project the learner ships at their job), and post-program career impact.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real value of an MBA (frameworks, network, credibility), not just content, and designs the 1-month program around delivering a compressed version of exactly that.
- Makes hard prioritization calls explicit, naming the 3 to 4 areas kept and implying the rest is cut, rather than trying to cram a full 2-year curriculum into a month.
- Addresses credibility directly, since a 1-month program's biggest risk is being seen as lightweight, and proposes a concrete fix (school or practitioner partnership).
- Ties success to a real-world capstone outcome, not just a certificate, reflecting what actually matters to a career-focused learner.
Common mistakes
- Trying to compress the entire traditional MBA curriculum into a month instead of ruthlessly prioritizing.
- Ignoring the credibility and networking value of an MBA, which content alone cannot replace.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep the cohort's networking value strong in such a short program?
- How would you measure long-term career impact, not just program completion?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- 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