Product Sense Interview Questions and Answers (2025 Guide)

Product sense interviews are designed to showcase your creativity, empathy, and problem-solving skills during PM interviews.

Top Product Sense Interview Questions

These are the most commonly asked product sense interview questions.

They include a mix of product design, improvement, and strategy questions.

• What's your favorite product and why?
• How would you improve your favorite product?
• How would you improve Instagram Stories?
• Design a product for space travel.
• Design a parking feature for Maps.
• How would you improve Facebook Marketplace?
• Design a product for drivers in rush hour.
• How would you improve Spotify?
• How would you improve iOS in 5 years?

Companies with product sense interviews

These are a few companies that have product sense rounds.

• Stripe PM Interview Guide
• Meta PM Interview Guide
• Microsoft PM Interview Guide
• Lyft PM Interview Guide

Interview Framework

Follow this seven-step process to deliver an effective answer to product sense questions.

There is no correct answer to these questions.

• Step 1: Clarify and get context
• Step 2: Define users
• Step 3: Identify pain points and opportunity areas
• Step 4: Brainstorm possible solutions
• Step 5: Define a product vision
• Step 6: Prioritize features
• Step 7: Evaluate and recap

Step 1: Clarify

First, clarify the problem you’ve been given.

Gather context to help you understand the problem space and define any strategic considerations that might influence your design.

• What’s the timeline?
• Are there any constraints I should be aware of?

Step 2: Define users

Next, divide the total user base into subsets of users. Then, select an interesting group for a more detailed analysis.

• Demographics like age or income level
• Behavioral traits (e.g., in-app actions, frequency of use, etc.)
• Geographic location

Choose a segmentation method that is relevant to the question at hand.

After choosing a segmentation method and identifying basic user subsets, select a subset that interests you and explain why it's valuable to discuss.

• User subsets that may be strategic, such as early adopters
• Scale of impact, or the intensity of pain that users experience
• How effectively you or your company can address these users in the context of your question

Step 3: Identify pain points and opportunities

Do your users have obstacles or pain points?

Take a moment to summarize the goals you think your user subset has, then brainstorm pain points and opportunity areas preventing them from achieving those goals.

• Is the user's goal urgent?
• Are they making important decisions? Trivial?

Step 4: Brainstorm solutions

Now, brainstorm ideas that could solve their pain points.

For example, Duolingo might be a good example of how to improve a gym.

Both products remove barriers for people who want to improve (by learning a language) but have trouble with motivation, routine, or planning. The app is fun, easy to use, and emphasizes consistency rather than intensity.

These are all characteristics you might incorporate into your recommendations.

Generate at least three solid ideas before proceeding.

Check each idea against the identified pain point.

Don't be afraid to get creative. Interviewers want to see excitement and passion for products.

Step 5: Product vision

Pick the strongest solution from the previous section and imagine what that product will look like in five or ten years.

Come up with a brief tagline that really emphasizes the point you're making.

You want to leave the interviewer with a soundbite they’ll remember when scoring your interview.

Write it on the whiteboard (if you’re using one) and refer back to it as you continue.

Step 6: Prioritize features

Take the interviewer through a quick user journey where a user interacts with your product.

This will help you concretely identify how your product fits into the existing user flow which will help you prioritize features.

It’ll also help you stay user-centric instead of over-defining an idea that appeals to you personally.

Then, brainstorm a short list of features based on your use case(s) and prioritize according to which features best support your product vision. Be sure to tie the discussion back to user pain points.

Here are a few helpful dimensions to consider:

• Scale: How many users does this help?
• Ease of expansion: How easily will this feature expand to other user subsets? Will it attract new users?
• Strategic impact: How well does this feature support the company vision?

You don’t need to describe every part of the feature in detail, but interviewers do expect you to describe what the user sees and interacts with and how that delivers on the product goals and vision you defined.

Step 7: Evaluate and recap

As you wrap up, summarize your insights for your interviewer.

Spend a few minutes evaluating your design and discussing next steps.

• What tradeoffs did you make?
• What edge cases did you consider?
• What would you do differently if you had more time?

Common follow-up questions from interviewers include:

• "Can you see any risks with this design?"
• "What challenges do you anticipate in implementing this product?"

Interview Tips

Here are some tips to ace your product sense interviews.

Consider the company strategy.

Bringing strategic concerns into the mix can help you reach a broader and deeper understanding of the problem.

• Company mission: What’s the company mission? Why does the company care about this space? How could this product support the mission?
• Company strategy: What are the relevant strategic goals the company might have? How could this tie into those or open up a new plan? What products make sense strategically?
• Market understanding: What alternatives already exist in the market? Where are the gaps? What’s valuable in this market?

Abstract the problem.

Moonshots are bold ideas that go beyond incremental changes.

They’re frequently associated with Google interviews, but you can “moonshot” any design question by digging deep until you’ve uncovered the root of an essential problem in a transformative way.

Try to think of the product as a black box. The input is the user’s current state, and the output is the user's state as they want it to be.

Real transformative solutions can sometimes become clear by eliminating all assumptions about how to get users from where they are to where they want to be and exploring what could happen in that space.

You could also consider the user’s actual goals.

For instance, if you’re asked to build a fire alarm for deaf users, consider the user’s goal to stay safe during a fire. Consider other ways to achieve this goal rather than limiting yourself to modifying how existing fire alarms work.

Consider existing users and goals.

Sometimes, you’ll be asked to improve an existing product.

Questions like “Improve Instagram’s homepage” are similar to “Design X” questions.

Consider established users, goals, and market dynamics. Keep these in mind, and consider addressing under-served users, supporting new use cases, or adapting a product to open new strategic opportunities.

Interview Mistakes

These are some common pitfalls candidates make during product sense interviews.

• Jumping straight to a solution: Ensure you articulate your thought process so the interviewer can understand your reasoning and why your idea is viable. Avoid settling on a solution immediately after hearing the question. Maintain an open mind as better ideas emerge as you delve deeper into the problem.
• Forgetting to segment users: In certain design questions, you may be given a specific user subgroup or constraint to design for, such as "Design Gmail for kids." A common mistake is overlooking the need to segment users despite having an upfront constraint. For the Gmail question, "kids" is a broad group. You could focus on a specific age range or school level. To delve deeper, consider discussing capabilities and constraints relevant to your segment. For instance, if your segment is early elementary school kids, key constraints could be their limited writing skills, potential lack of tech savviness, and the paramount importance of their safety.
• Trying to design for everybody: Designing for everyone often results in a product that fails to resonate with anyone. Obtaining meaningful insights about your users and their pain points becomes challenging without narrowing your scope.
• Checking off the boxes: While using a framework can help stay on track, remember that its steps are recommendations for gaining insights, not a mandatory checklist. Ensure you evaluate your answer comprehensively at each stage.

Improving Your Product Sense

Below, we discuss improving your product sense with Shreyas Doshi, a renowned product leader who has led teams and built successful products at Stripe, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter.

The first step to improving one's product sense is understanding what it really is.

I define it as the ability to make correct decisions even when faced with considerable ambiguity.

This should be at multiple levels of product development.

First, at the "what product should we build" level. But also regarding user interactions, interfaces, and everything in between. Product sense is about the entire experience.

There are three elements to good product sense:

1. Empathy is the ability to simulate the mental processes of multiple personas that are nothing like you. It means saying, "Well, in this situation, this type of user will react like this." Or, "Our partners will react like this. And our competitors will perceive our actions like that."
2. Domain knowledge will naturally lead to better and more accurate ideas about what product to build and how to build it. Focus on knowledge about your customers and users, the competition and their actions, and technology limitations or opportunities.
3. Creativity is the most elusive but nonetheless important aspect of product sense. It involves thinking differently and developing new ideas for addressing a particular problem.

Improving your product sense involves developing empathy, growing domain knowledge, and boosting creativity.

Interact with diverse users and partners to enhance your empathy. Instead of simply acquiring information, understand the reasons behind their responses. This understanding lets you predict user reactions even when they're not present.

Another strategy is to deepen your understanding of psychology.

Engaging with cognitive biases, behavioral economics, and general psychology literature can help you build and empathize with user archetypes.

Domain knowledge requires identifying relevant resources and reviewing them regularly. Books, online resources, and podcasts can be helpful for this purpose.

If you're building smartphone apps, use as many apps as possible. Scrutinize the details and ask questions about design choices. When faced with a challenge, draw on your extensive experience, enabling creativity through pattern recognition.

PM Interview Advice

Landing a product job requires more than just applying!

1. Create an excellent PM resume: Companies like Google receive over three million applications yearly. 80-90% of candidates never pass the resume screen. Ask friends, mentors, or our tech resume coaches to review your resume. Use our PM resume template if you need help getting started.
2. Prepare for interviews: The product management interview process will test your product sense, product design, product strategy, analytical and estimation skills, and behavioral fit with the company. Review the most frequently asked PM questions and answers.
3. Review the company: Each company has a unique mission, products, and approach to PM interviews. Spend time understanding how they envision their place in the world. How could you help them achieve that vision? 
4. Practice: Even the most knowledgeable candidates can feel nervous during the interview. You can practice with Exponent's free peer-to-peer PM mock interview portal. Every day, PM candidates role-play in 1:1 mock interviews and give feedback.
5. Interview: All the preparation and hard work you've done has led up to this moment! It's time to turn on your camera and nail those PM interviews!