Product design question
Pick any industry and tell me the pain points of customers in that industry. Design a system for the pain points. How would you measure success?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests end-to-end product thinking from problem identification through design to success measurement, applied to an industry the candidate chooses themselves.
How to approach it
- Pick a specific industry and a specific, well-known pain point within it, such as healthcare scheduling: patients struggle to book appointments and often face long wait times for basic care access.
- Identify the affected users: patients seeking timely care, and providers managing limited appointment capacity efficiently.
- Prioritize the core problem: mismatched supply and demand visibility, patients cannot easily see real-time availability across providers, leading to delays and no-shows.
- Propose the system: a real-time, cross-provider appointment marketplace showing actual open slots, with smart matching based on urgency and specialty need.
- Define an MVP: launch with a small number of partnering clinics in one region, focusing on real-time availability display and booking before adding advanced triage features.
- Define success: reduction in time-to-appointment and no-show rate, and provider slot utilization rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks one specific, well-defined pain point within the chosen industry rather than trying to solve the whole industry broadly.
- Identifies the true root cause, poor supply-demand visibility across providers, rather than a superficial symptom like a clunky booking interface.
- Chooses a narrow, testable MVP in one region with partnering clinics before proposing a nationwide system.
- Defines measurable success (time-to-appointment, no-show rate, utilization) directly tied to the identified pain point.
Common mistakes
- Picking an industry but never narrowing to a specific, well-defined pain point within it.
- Proposing a system with no clear success metric tied back to the original problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get provider buy-in to share real-time availability data?
- How would you handle urgent versus routine appointment requests differently in the matching system?
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