Product design question
Imagine you were the PM of Google Glass, which had been out of the market. How would you have designed and launched it, such that it became a success?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Strategic product relaunch thinking, checking whether you can diagnose why the original product failed and design specifically against those failure points.
How to approach it
- Diagnose the original failure: Google Glass failed on privacy concerns, a high 1,500 dollar price, an awkward form factor, and unclear everyday use case.
- Redefine the target user: instead of general consumers, target a narrow professional use case first, such as warehouse workers or surgeons needing hands-free information.
- Address privacy directly: add a visible recording indicator and default-off camera, responding to the 'Glasshole' backlash from the original launch.
- Redesign the value proposition around one clear job, hands-free step-by-step guidance, rather than a general-purpose computing device.
- Sequence the launch: enterprise and vertical use cases first to prove value and lower price through volume, consumer launch only after the use case and social acceptance are proven.
- Define success as task completion time improvement in the target vertical and adoption rate among target professionals, not general consumer sales.
What a strong answer includes
- Directly ties each design decision to a specific historical failure point, price, privacy, and unclear use case, rather than redesigning blindly.
- Chooses a narrow enterprise wedge first, mirroring how many failed consumer hardware products found success by re-launching in vertical markets.
- Defines success with vertical-specific metrics instead of consumer sales, appropriate for the revised go-to-market.
Common mistakes
- Redesigning the product without directly addressing why the original failed, effectively repeating the same mistakes.
- Relaunching straight to consumers again despite the well-documented privacy backlash the first time.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle the privacy concerns if this eventually goes to consumers?
- What would tell you it's time to move from enterprise to consumer?
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