Product design question
Imagine you are product manager for Android OS. How would you think about battery optimization?
- 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
Product thinking for a platform-level, ecosystem-wide problem rather than a single app feature.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: OS-level battery management across all apps and OEMs, not one app.
- Segment the causes: rogue background apps, display draw, radios like 5G and GPS, and OEM skins overriding defaults.
- Prioritize background app activity first, usually the largest fixable drain, for example apps polling location while backgrounded.
- Propose extending adaptive battery with per-app budget enforcement and clearer user-facing battery attribution.
- Balance user control against automation: power users want overrides, average users want it to just work.
- Define success as average daily battery life improvement and fewer battery-drain support complaints.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the answer in real Android mechanisms, Doze mode and App Standby Buckets, instead of an invented feature.
- Segments the problem by cause before proposing fixes, showing structured thinking on a broad platform question.
- Flags OEM fragmentation, aggressive battery killers on Samsung or Xiaomi, as a constraint unique to Android versus iOS.
Common mistakes
- Proposing 'just add a battery saver mode' without addressing why apps drain battery in the first place.
- Ignoring OEM fragmentation, a distinctly Android problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How do you balance battery savings against apps that need background updates, like messaging?
- How would you measure whether a fix actually worked at scale?
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