Product design question
You were a PM on Microsoft Surface and Delta asked you to design the perfect airline entertainment system. You decide the features, scenarios, and users. What would you do?
- Microsoft
- Salesforce
- 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
Whether you can define scenarios and users for an ambiguous cross-company design prompt and design a scoped, buildable system.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: an in-flight entertainment system built on Surface-like hardware for Delta passengers, spanning economy through first class.
- Segment users by trip type: business travelers wanting productivity and connectivity, leisure travelers wanting entertainment, families needing kid content.
- Prioritize the business traveler segment first, since Surface's strength is productivity, not just media consumption.
- Propose a concrete feature: seatback Surface tablets offering offline work continuity, synced automatically once the flight lands and wifi reconnects.
- Address entertainment needs as a secondary layer: downloaded movies and shows to avoid dependence on unreliable in-flight wifi.
- Define success metrics: device usage rate per flight and post-flight satisfaction, with a guardrail on device damage or theft rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Chooses a specific starting segment, business travelers, that plays to Surface's actual productivity strength rather than being a generic tablet.
- Proposes offline-first sync as the killer feature, addressing the real constraint of unreliable in-flight connectivity.
- Layers entertainment as secondary rather than the primary focus, matching the hardware partner's actual differentiation.
- Names a guardrail, device damage or theft, since seatback hardware faces real operational risk airlines must manage.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic entertainment system that ignores why Surface, specifically, was chosen as the hardware.
- Ignoring in-flight connectivity limits and assuming constant, reliable wifi for all features.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle device theft or damage across an airline's whole fleet?
- What would change about this design for economy versus first class cabins?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve Microsoft OneNote?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve the MS Teams search functionality as a Search PM at Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you design a car sharing platform like Uber for disabled people?Lyft · Product design · Hard
More questions from these companies
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