Strategy question

You are a product owner at Splitwise. Leaders are asking you to put search functionality on the homepage. What are the pros and cons of doing this?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Ability to reason through a feature placement decision with structured tradeoffs, since the question explicitly asks for pros and cons.

Clarify what is being searched: expenses, groups, or people, since the tradeoff differs by use case.
List pros: faster access for power users with many groups, reduced navigation depth, and higher discoverability of a buried feature.
List cons: added visual complexity on a currently simple, expense focused homepage, and it may not serve casual users with 1 or 2 groups.
Bring in data to resolve it: check what share of users have enough groups or expenses that search is actually needed.
Give a recommendation: add search to the homepage only if usage data shows a meaningful power user segment, otherwise keep it secondary.

Actually answers the pros and cons framing the question asks for, instead of jumping straight to a recommendation.
Segments the tradeoff by user type, which changes whether search is needed on the homepage.
Proposes checking real usage data to resolve the tradeoff rather than guessing.

Skipping the pros and cons structure the question explicitly asks for and jumping to a verdict.
Assuming all users need search without checking whether most only have a couple of groups.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.