A product manager’s core responsibilities include working with a team to design, build, ship, and continuously improve a product. During product manager interviews, most companies love to hone in on your ability to execute against these responsibilities by asking how you might think about designing a product.

The popular product design question usually takes the form of something like:

“Walk me through how you would design X product for Y user”

Some common examples of questions we’ve frequently heard include:

• Design a pen for an astronaut
• Design an alarm clock for a blind person
• An elevator for an individual in a wheelchair

Generally speaking, a good product should solve a user's need in an effective, and perhaps even elegant or delightful, way. At the end of the day, people use a product because it actually does something for them. As users' basic needs in an area are met, the bar for what a good product looks like might rise.

Some problems are about fundamental needs (e.g., Streeteasy for finding a new home), while others might be about desiring a psychologically positive emotion (e.g., TikTok for finding amusing content). Some products can have many target user groups (e.g., Quickbooks for accounting for businesses of different sizes); others may have a very specific target user (e.g., Jira for software development teams). Some products may end up solving many user needs (e.g., Facebook), but most products tend to start with one user need (or a tightly related cluster) and expand from there (e.g., Google Sheets).

Good products also tend to solve user needs well—some might even say elegantly. An elegant solution could be so simple that it's hard to imagine what life was like before that solution, or a very creative solution. "Elegant" is relative and might change over time as more products come to market addressing that need.

Rarely does a need get 100% solved, nor might the need be solved permanently. Needs evolve as users get accustomed to the products out there; having one need addressed also frequently leads to developing new needs. This is what keeps product people on their toes!

So given all this, what does a strong product answer usually cover? A simple but very effective framework focuses on the users: Who are they? What do they need? How can we address that need? That is when product design comes into the picture.