Product design question
Pick an app for listening to music & podcasts. What is this app's goal? What does it do well? What can be improved to drive engagement?
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
Whether the candidate can critically evaluate a real product's strategy and identify a specific, actionable improvement rather than generic praise or criticism.
How to approach it
- Pick a specific app, for example Spotify, and state its goal precisely: maximize daily listening time and convert free users to paid subscribers.
- Identify what it does well, such as personalized playlists (Discover Weekly) that drive habitual daily return visits.
- Identify a specific gap, such as weak discovery or completion for podcasts and audiobooks compared to music.
- Propose one focused improvement, such as better cross-device resume and personalized podcast discovery, tied to the stated goal of engagement.
- Define success as a measurable lift, such as increased weekly podcast listening hours among users who already stream music.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks a real, specific app and states its actual business goal rather than a generic 'make users happy' framing.
- Names one concrete gap, not a laundry list, showing prioritization.
- Ties the proposed improvement back to the stated goal with a specific, measurable metric.
Common mistakes
- Staying too general about what the app does well or poorly without specifics.
- Proposing an improvement unrelated to the app's actual business goal.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate that this gap is worth prioritizing over other opportunities?
- What tradeoff would this improvement create elsewhere in the product?
More product design questions
- How would you improve YouTube?Spotify · Product design · Easy
- How would you re-design the carwash?Spotify · Product design · Medium
- Design a library for the future.Spotify · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve Netflix?Spotify · Product design · Easy
- What is your favorite product? Why?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve Spotify?Spotify · Product design · Easy
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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