Product design question
Technical case: If you were to create Google Local Offers (which interviewer described as an app that sends push notifications for discounts for stores when you are close to them), what technical components do you need? What is the workflow, what would you need to store on the phone local storage? What interfaces would you need and what do they look like? What risks do you run into?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Technical system design thinking for a PM: can you reason through architecture, local storage, interfaces, and risk for a location triggered notification product.
How to approach it
- Define the workflow: app periodically checks device location, compares against nearby merchant offer geofences, and triggers a push notification when a match is found.
- Identify the technical components: a geofencing service, a merchant offers database, a matching engine, and the push notification system.
- Decide what lives on device versus server, cache nearby offers locally so the phone does not need constant server calls, syncing periodically to save battery.
- Define the interface: merchants submit offers with location, radius, and schedule through a dashboard, and the app exposes a simple opt in settings screen for users.
- Identify risks: battery drain from frequent location checks, privacy concerns over constant tracking, and notification fatigue if too many offers trigger at once.
- Propose mitigations: batch location checks instead of continuous polling, clear opt in consent, and frequency capping on notifications.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly separates on device caching from server side offer matching, showing real systems thinking, not just a feature list.
- Names battery and privacy as concrete risks with specific mitigations, not just says there could be risks.
- Describes the merchant facing interface as well as the consumer one, since this is a two sided system.
Common mistakes
- Describing only the user facing notification without addressing backend architecture or data storage.
- Ignoring battery drain and privacy risk, the two biggest real world failure points for geofencing products.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you cap notification frequency without missing a relevant offer?
- How would you handle a merchant submitting a false or expired offer?
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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