Product design question
Improve the lock screen experience of mobile phones and how you can justify the design with metrics.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product design combined with metrics justification: can the candidate propose a change and immediately connect it to measurable outcomes.
How to approach it
- Identify the user: anyone glancing at their phone dozens of times a day, where lock screen friction and clutter cause repeated small annoyances.
- Name pain points: notification overload on the lock screen makes it hard to find what matters, and glanceable information (weather, calendar) is often missing or buried.
- Propose an improvement: a prioritized, digest-style lock screen that groups notifications by urgency and surfaces one or two glanceable widgets based on time of day and usage patterns.
- Justify with metrics: measure unlock-to-first-action time (how quickly a user gets to what they need) before and after the change.
- Add a guardrail metric: total screen-on time should not increase, since the goal is efficiency, not increased phone engagement.
- Define success as reduced unlock-to-action time and reduced notification dismiss-without-reading rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Pairs the design change directly with a specific metric, unlock-to-first-action time, rather than a vague 'better experience' claim.
- Adds an explicit guardrail, screen-on time should not rise, showing awareness that lock screen changes could accidentally increase compulsive checking.
- Uses notification dismiss-without-reading rate as a proxy for clutter, a specific, measurable signal of the stated problem.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a visual redesign without stating any metric to justify or validate it, despite the prompt explicitly asking for one.
- Ignoring the risk that a more engaging lock screen could increase unwanted screen time rather than reduce friction.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you personalize the digest without access to app-level notification content for privacy reasons?
- What would make you roll this change back after launch?
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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