Product design question
In the growing age of working from home, what should Microsoft invest in to make this Work from Home more productive than it is today? This could be a new product line or enhancements to an existing product line for Microsoft to win in this new age of remote working.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests strategic product thinking on where to invest in an existing suite for a durable behavior shift toward hybrid work.
How to approach it
- Scope this as an enhancement to Teams rather than a new product, given Microsoft's existing remote-work position.
- Segment on hybrid-meeting attendees, the highest-pain, most underserved group today compared to fully remote or fully in-office workers.
- Identify the pain point: hybrid meetings favor in-room participants, remote attendees miss the whiteboard, side conversations and eye-contact cues.
- Invest in hybrid-meeting equity features, smart cameras and room sensors giving remote attendees equal visibility, plus AI meeting notes so no one has to multitask on note-taking.
- Define success as remote-participant speaking-time share in meetings and the satisfaction gap between in-room and remote attendees.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a specific, underserved segment, remote attendees in hybrid meetings, rather than a generic collaboration answer.
- Grounds the metric in equity between attendee types, not a vague collaboration score.
- Connects the plan to Microsoft's real assets, Teams, Surface Hub and Azure AI.
Common mistakes
- Proposing something generic like better video calls without naming the specific hybrid-equity pain point.
- Ignoring Microsoft's existing assets it could build on.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure meeting equity concretely?
- What would you prioritize first with a limited engineering budget?
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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