Design a City-Run App That Helps Parents Discover Children's Activities
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You have just joined the product team of the city of Molete, which calls itself the best city in the world. Your assignment is to create an app that parents can use to find activities for their children. Explain how you would design it: whose needs you would focus on, what the app would do, what you would build first, and how you would know it is working.
```hint Start from the city's goal
A city government is not a startup chasing revenue. Decide what the city wants to achieve for families before choosing which parents to serve and which features to build.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Should the app cover only programs the city runs itself, such as parks, libraries and community centers, or also private clubs, classes and camps?
- Which ages are in scope: toddlers, school-age children, teenagers, or all of them?
- What does the city most want from the app: more use of its own programs, happier residents, or fairer access to activities across neighborhoods?
- Should parents only discover activities in the app, or also register and pay for them there?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that fits a city's public-service role, and a north-star metric that follows from it.
- Parent segments by child age and family circumstances, with a reasoned choice of whom to serve first.
- Concrete pain points in finding, judging and signing up for activities, each tied to a feature.
- A prioritized first version, including where the activity data comes from and how it stays current.
- Success metrics with guardrails on child safety, privacy and fair treatment of activity providers.
### Follow-up Questions
- Six months after launch, parents complain that many listings show the wrong times or prices. What do you change?
- Private providers offer to pay for top placement in search results. Should a city-run app accept, and why?
- How would you tell whether the app is reaching families in lower-income neighborhoods, and what would you do if it is not?
Overview: A product design prompt in which a city's product team must create an app that helps parents find activities for their children. It tests setting a goal suited to a public-sector product, choosing a parent segment, prioritizing a first version, and defining success metrics with safety, privacy and fairness guardrails.