Product design question
What factors will you consider while designing an online returns experience for a home improvement e-tailer?
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a returns flow in a category with unusually bulky or heavy items, a distinct challenge from typical e-commerce returns.
How to approach it
- Segment products: small hardware or tools that ship easily by mail, versus large or bulky items like appliances that are impractical to mail.
- Identify the pain point: customers with large or heavy items face confusion figuring out how to return something too big for standard shipping.
- Prioritize the large or bulky item segment, since that is the category-specific challenge a generic returns flow doesn't solve well.
- Design the solution: an in-app returns flow that routes bulky items to in-store drop-off or scheduled pickup, while small items get standard mail-return labels.
- Add a diagnostic step for defective large items, letting customers submit photos for faster approval before arranging pickup.
- Define success: return resolution time and reduction in customer support contacts related to bulky item returns.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly identifies the category-specific challenge, bulky and heavy items, that differentiates this from a standard returns flow.
- Proposes a routing mechanism based on item type, a practical, concrete design detail.
- Adds a photo-based pre-approval step for damaged large items, reducing costly unnecessary pickup trips.
- Uses resolution time and support contact reduction as measurable, operationally meaningful success metrics.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic returns flow that ignores the unique logistics of bulky home improvement items.
- Not considering in-store drop-off as an option for a retailer likely to have physical locations.
- Ignoring the cost of unnecessary pickup trips for items resolvable with photo evidence.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle returns for custom-cut or non-returnable items like cut lumber?
- How would you balance return-friendliness against fraud risk for bulky, high-value items?
- How would you measure customer satisfaction specifically for the bulky-item return path?
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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