Product design question
You are a PM at Subway. Design a product to help store managers run stores efficiently.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests B2B operational product design: can you identify a franchise store manager's real daily pain points and design a tool around them, not a customer-facing feature.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: a Subway franchise store manager juggling labor scheduling, inventory (bread, produce), food safety compliance, and daily sales tracking across a small team.
- Identify the top pain points: inconsistent inventory forecasting leading to waste or stockouts of fresh ingredients, and manual labor scheduling that does not account for demand patterns (lunch rush, weekends).
- Prioritize an inventory and demand-forecasting tool as the highest-leverage feature, since fresh-ingredient waste directly hits franchise profitability, a metric owners care about intensely.
- Design the solution: a dashboard that predicts daily ingredient needs based on historical sales and local events, with simple reorder suggestions the manager can approve in one tap.
- Add a labor-scheduling layer: suggest shift coverage based on predicted footfall, reducing both understaffing during rushes and overstaffing during slow periods.
- Define success as reduced ingredient waste percentage and labor cost as a percentage of sales, both metrics franchise owners track closely.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the design in franchise economics specifically, since Subway managers are often owner-operators who feel waste and labor cost directly, unlike a corporate-store manager.
- Prioritizes inventory forecasting as the top pain point with a clear profitability rationale, rather than a generic 'dashboard with everything'.
- Proposes a simple one-tap reorder approval flow, respecting that store managers have little time for complex tools during a shift.
- Picks metrics (waste percentage, labor cost percent of sales) that map to what franchise owners actually optimize for.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic 'store management app' with no prioritization of the highest-impact pain point.
- Ignoring that Subway is largely franchise-operated, which changes who the actual buyer and user is.
- No tie to profitability metrics that franchise owners specifically care about.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this tool differ for a high-volume urban location versus a low-volume suburban one?
- How would you get franchise owners, who may resist new tools, to adopt this?
- What would you measure in a pilot before rolling this out chain-wide?
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- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How do you design an app for on-demand beauty services?Product design · Medium
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