Product design question
Pretend you're a Product Manager at Google Maps. Your objective is to increase customer engagement with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). What do you do? Next, how would you get SMBs to implement your solution?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Two part product and go to market thinking: can you design an SMB engagement feature and separately reason about adoption and distribution to that business audience.
How to approach it
- Define the SMB pain point on Google Maps today: limited tools to actively engage searchers beyond a static listing, like responding to demand spikes or promoting time sensitive offers.
- Design the product piece: a simple in app promotion tool letting SMBs push short term offers or updates that surface directly on their Maps listing and in relevant local searches.
- Prioritize simplicity over a full marketing suite, since most SMB owners lack dedicated marketing staff and will not use a complex tool.
- For the second part, getting SMBs to adopt it, propose direct outreach through existing Google Business Profile touchpoints, since SMBs already check that dashboard for reviews and hours.
- Add a low friction incentive, like a free trial period or highlighting early results, for example increased calls or visits, to prove value quickly.
- Define success as SMB adoption rate of the tool and measurable increase in customer actions like calls or direction requests for participating businesses.
What a strong answer includes
- Answers both parts explicitly, the feature design and the separate go to market question, matching what was actually asked.
- Grounds distribution in an existing SMB touchpoint, Google Business Profile, rather than assuming a new channel is needed.
- Uses a concrete adoption incentive, early proof of results, tailored to time strapped small business owners.
Common mistakes
- Answering only the product design half and ignoring the explicit second question about driving SMB adoption.
- Designing a complex tool that assumes SMBs have marketing expertise or staff time they typically do not.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you price this for a small business with a limited budget?
- How would you measure if the promotion tool actually drives incremental visits, not just shifts timing?
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
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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