Product design question
Tell me about a product that is useful but unprofitable.
- Product design
- Easy
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
Product sense and business model awareness, checking you can identify genuine user value separate from monetization success.
How to approach it
- Pick a specific product known for strong utility but weak or absent revenue generation, and briefly justify why it's useful.
- Explain the specific value it delivers to users, being concrete about the job it does well.
- Explain why it struggles to be profitable, whether that's a free ad-supported model with low margins, high operating cost, or no clear monetization path.
- Discuss the tradeoff the company accepted, for example subsidizing the product for strategic reasons like user acquisition or ecosystem lock-in.
- Consider whether this tradeoff is sustainable long term, or whether the product would need a business model change to survive.
- Keep the answer grounded in a real, specific example rather than a hypothetical.
What a strong answer includes
- Chooses a product with a clear, well-known utility-versus-profitability tension, and explains the mechanism behind the imbalance specifically.
- Distinguishes between temporarily unprofitable for strategic reasons, like ecosystem lock-in, and structurally unprofitable due to a broken business model.
- Shows judgment about sustainability, discussing whether the company can keep subsidizing it indefinitely.
- Avoids vague claims, grounding profitability concerns in a specific driver like high infrastructure cost or a free ad-supported tier with low CPMs.
Common mistakes
- Naming a product but only vaguely gesturing at 'it's probably not profitable' with no mechanism.
- Choosing a product that is actually profitable, undermining the premise.
- Not distinguishing strategic subsidization from a genuinely broken business model.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you change about its business model to make it sustainably profitable?
- Why might a company keep investing in a product that isn't profitable?
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