Product design question
You are a Product Manager of CANON (camera manufacturing company), You see your market share decreasing year on year due to higher Mobile phone penetration. How would you increase the revenue and market share of the company?
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What this question tests
Strategic thinking about defending a legacy hardware business against a structural, technology-driven market shift (smartphone camera cannibalization).
How to approach it
- Diagnose the real threat: smartphones have eliminated casual point-and-shoot photography, so Canon's growth must come from segments smartphones can't serve, not general consumers.
- Identify defensible segments: professional and enthusiast photographers/videographers, where image quality, lenses, and control still matter more than convenience.
- Propose a strategic focus: double down on the professional and prosumer segment (mirrorless systems, lenses, video/cinema cameras) and adjacent recurring revenue like cloud storage or editing software subscriptions.
- Address the revenue mix explicitly: shift from one-time hardware sales toward recurring software/service revenue tied to the camera ecosystem.
- Define success as market share within the professional/prosumer segment specifically, not overall camera unit sales, which will keep declining regardless.
What a strong answer includes
- Correctly reframes the goal away from competing with smartphones and toward defending a specific, still-defensible segment.
- Proposes a recurring-revenue angle, software and services, consistent with how other hardware companies have responded to commoditization.
- Picks the right success metric, segment share, not total unit sales, matching the realistic scope of the turnaround.
Common mistakes
- Proposing Canon compete directly with smartphone cameras on convenience, a battle it structurally cannot win.
- Measuring success by total revenue or unit sales instead of share within the defensible professional segment.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you monetize the professional ecosystem beyond one-time hardware purchases?
- What would make you recommend Canon exit a segment entirely rather than defend it?
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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