Product design question
You are given a team of 10 engineers at Google. What would you build?
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Open ended product sense and prioritization: can you pick a high value problem worth ten engineers and justify the choice over other options.
How to approach it
- Pick a real, bounded problem area at Google rather than a vague vision, for example reducing spam and low quality results in a specific Search vertical.
- State why this problem, sizing the opportunity, for example a meaningful share of queries in that vertical return unsatisfying results today.
- Explain why ten engineers is the right size, neither a two person experiment nor a hundred person moonshot.
- Outline what you would build in the first quarter versus longer term, showing a staged plan.
- Define success with a concrete metric, like query satisfaction rate in that vertical.
- Acknowledge the alternative you did not pick and why you ranked this higher.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks a specific, scoped problem instead of a broad theme like improve search.
- Justifies team size against the problem's complexity rather than treating ten as arbitrary.
- Shows a staged roadmap, proving the team would not sit idle waiting for a big bang launch.
Common mistakes
- Proposing something too broad for ten engineers, like rebuild all of Search.
- No mention of why this beats other reasonable uses of the same team.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you cut if you only had five engineers instead of ten?
- How would you know within three months if this was the wrong bet?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
More questions from Google
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