Product design question
Take a grocery app - what would be the features you would suggest?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Feature prioritization for a defined product category, checking whether you can propose features tied to actual grocery shopping pain points rather than a generic feature list.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a busy household shopper balancing budget, freshness, and time, distinguishing them from a bulk or specialty shopper.
- Identify top pain points: unclear produce freshness before delivery, forgetting recurring staples, and difficulty substituting out-of-stock items.
- Prioritize substitution handling first, since out-of-stock substitutions are the most common cause of grocery delivery dissatisfaction.
- Propose features: a smart substitution preference setting learned from past choices, a recurring staples list with one-tap reorder, and photo confirmation of produce quality before checkout.
- Sequence delivery: substitution preferences first since it directly reduces complaints, staples reorder second to build habit, produce photos last as a trust-building layer.
- Define success as reduced substitution-related complaints and increased reorder rate for staples.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors on substitution handling as the top priority, backed by the reasoning that it's the most common grocery delivery complaint, not a guess.
- Sequences features by impact and effort rather than listing them with no prioritization logic.
- Ties each feature to a specific, measurable outcome instead of vague 'improve experience' language.
Common mistakes
- Listing many features with no prioritization logic, which reads as a brainstorm rather than a product plan.
- Ignoring substitution handling, the single most common friction point in grocery delivery.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you personalize substitution preferences without requiring manual setup?
- How would you measure whether produce photo confirmation actually improves trust?
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