Strategy question
What should Microsoft's strategy be if they were to attempt to re-release a mobile device, taking into consideration current market trends and consumer preferences?
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Strategic market re-entry thinking, checking whether you can diagnose why Windows Phone failed and design around those specific structural weaknesses.
How to approach it
- Diagnose the original failure: Windows Phone failed primarily due to a weak app ecosystem, since developers prioritized iOS and Android, leaving the platform without key apps.
- Assess current market reality: iOS and Android now hold a near-duopoly, making direct competition on the same terms extremely difficult for any new entrant.
- Identify Microsoft's actual current advantage: strong enterprise relationships, Office 365, and Azure integration, rather than trying to win consumers on hardware alone.
- Recommend against a broad consumer relaunch, and instead propose a narrow enterprise-focused device deeply integrated with Microsoft's productivity and security ecosystem.
- Address the app gap directly: rely on web-based and cross-platform apps rather than trying to rebuild a native app ecosystem from scratch, learning from the original failure.
- Define success as adoption within existing enterprise Microsoft 365 customers rather than broad consumer market share, a more realistic and defensible goal.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the specific historical failure cause, the app gap, rather than giving a generic 'the market changed' explanation.
- Recommends a narrow enterprise wedge instead of a broad consumer relaunch, correctly reading that Microsoft cannot out-compete Apple and Google in the consumer app ecosystem today.
- Proposes solving the app gap differently this time, through web and cross-platform apps, rather than repeating the same failed native-app strategy.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a broad consumer relaunch without addressing the app ecosystem problem that killed the original Windows Phone.
- Ignoring Microsoft's actual current strengths, enterprise and productivity software, in favor of a generic 'better hardware' strategy.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you convince developers to build for this device given the historical app gap failure?
- What would be your exit criteria if enterprise adoption stalled after a year?
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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 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop