Product design question
The CEO wants you to develop a new list of features for Slack. How would you approach this?
- Slack
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
How you turn a vague executive mandate into a structured feature roadmap, and how you push back or clarify scope with a CEO.
How to approach it
- Ask the CEO what problem is driving this request: growth stalling, a competitor move, or a specific customer segment complaint.
- Review existing data: usage funnels, support tickets, and churn reasons within Slack's core messaging and workflow features.
- Talk to a few users or account teams across segments like small teams versus large enterprise IT admins.
- Generate a list of candidate features and bucket them by theme, such as async communication, admin controls, or AI-assisted search.
- Prioritize using an impact versus effort view, weighting features that address retention or expansion revenue.
- Present a short list of 3 to 5 features with the reasoning and a proposed sequencing back to the CEO.
What a strong answer includes
- Pushes back gently on 'new list of features' by first grounding the request in a business goal, like enterprise retention.
- Uses a specific Slack pain point, such as message overload or thread sprawl, rather than generic ideas.
- Balances CEO-driven top-down ideas with bottom-up signal from support tickets and NPS verbatims.
- Proposes a lightweight way to validate ideas fast, such as a design partner program with a handful of workspaces.
- Shows awareness that not every CEO idea should ship, and explains how they would frame a disagreement.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as 'just list features' without first understanding the underlying business goal.
- Not mentioning how they would validate before building.
- Avoiding any pushback on the CEO, which reads as lacking judgment.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the CEO insisted on a feature your data suggests is low value?
- How would you sequence these features across a quarter?
- How would you measure whether the new features worked?
More product design questions
- How do you improve Slack?Slack · Product design · Easy
- You are the product manager for Slack. How would you unlock more pathways for product-led growth?Slack · Product design · Medium
- You are a Product Manager for Telegram. What new features will you build?Slack · Product design · Hard
- How do you stop spamming at Slack?Slack · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- You’ve just joined Meta and have been tasked with launching a new product to help people at home during emergencies. What would you build?Meta · Product design · Medium
More questions from Slack
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