Product design question
You are the product manager at Target. How will you improve the shopping cart experience at Target stores?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement in a physical retail context: identifying friction in an in-store journey and proposing tech-enabled fixes.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: the physical shopping cart experience in Target stores, not the online cart.
- Identify pain points: finding items, navigating a large store, and long checkout lines.
- Propose a concrete fix, like a smart cart with a built-in map and scan-as-you-go checkout.
- Consider feasibility and cost, since hardware changes are expensive compared to a software-only fix.
- Define success as reduced checkout time and increased basket size from easier navigation.
What a strong answer includes
- Proposes a specific, known-feasible solution, like scan-and-go via the Target app on existing smart carts.
- Addresses a real pain point (long checkout lines) with a concrete mechanism, not a vague 'improve UX' statement.
- Weighs hardware cost against software-only alternatives, showing business awareness.
- Uses an assumed metric, e.g. cutting average checkout time by 3 minutes.
Common mistakes
- Proposing an expensive hardware overhaul with no cost-benefit discussion.
- Ignoring existing solutions like Target's own app-based scan-and-go feature.
- Not defining any way to measure the improvement.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you pilot this before a full store rollout?
- How would you handle theft risk with a self-checkout cart?
- What would you measure to know if this improved the experience?
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