Product design question
You are the CEO of a company that wants to revolutionize the restaurant industry. What would you do?
- 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
Broad strategic and product vision, testing whether you can think at CEO scope while staying grounded in a real user problem.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: which part of the restaurant industry, dine-in operations, delivery, discovery, or back-of-house management.
- Identify the biggest systemic pain point: thin margins and high operational complexity for restaurant owners, and inconsistent experience for diners.
- Pick a specific angle: back-of-house operational efficiency, like inventory, staffing, and demand forecasting, an area with real technology gaps for small restaurants.
- Propose a platform combining data-driven demand forecasting with integrated staffing and inventory tools, aimed at improving thin restaurant margins directly.
- Address go to market: start with a single city and restaurant type to prove the ROI before expanding, given how fragmented and local the industry is.
- Success metric: measurable margin improvement for restaurant partners, and partner retention rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Narrows an extremely broad prompt to one defensible, high-leverage angle, back-of-house margin improvement, rather than trying to cover everything.
- Grounds the idea in a real, known industry pain point, thin restaurant margins and operational complexity (common knowledge).
- Proposes a realistic go to market, starting narrow by city and restaurant type, appropriate for a fragmented, local industry.
Common mistakes
- Trying to address every part of the restaurant industry at once with no focus.
- No grounding in a real, specific operational pain point.
- Vague go to market with no phased approach for a highly fragmented, local industry.
Likely follow-up questions
- Why did you choose this angle over consumer-facing discovery or delivery?
- How would you convince a skeptical, thin-margin restaurant owner to adopt a new platform?
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