Design a Personal Health Record App That Gathers and Shares Medical History
Company: Microsoft
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Microsoft. Design an application that lets citizens gather their own medical information in one place and get to it whenever they need it. Choose who the product serves first, the problems it solves, what the first release includes, and how you would know it is working.
```hint Start with how records get in
Products that expect people to type in or upload their own records tend to go stale. Decide early how information reaches the app with little effort from the user, because that choice drives adoption more than any viewing feature.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Is this a Microsoft-branded consumer app, or a platform Microsoft would build for a government or health ministry? The word "citizens" suggests a public program.
- Which country or health system is it for? That decides whether hospitals keep electronic records and whether patients have a standard way to download them.
- Does "medical information" mean records held by hospitals, labs and pharmacies, details people enter themselves such as medicines and allergies, data from phones and wearables, or all of these?
- Who besides the patient needs access: family caregivers, doctors at other hospitals, emergency staff?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear goal and a deliberate choice of primary user segment (for example people with long-term conditions, older adults and their caregivers, or parents), with reasons.
- Pain points across the whole journey: getting records in, keeping them current, finding them during a visit or an emergency, and sharing them with clinicians or family.
- Features prioritized into a first release, with a concrete plan for low-effort data capture and connections to providers.
- Privacy, security, consent and delegated access for health data, and how they shape the design.
- Success metrics with guardrails, plus risks such as low adoption, inaccurate data and regulation.
### Follow-up Questions
- A patient arrives at an emergency room unconscious. What should staff be able to see without the patient unlocking the app, and how do you prevent abuse?
- After launch, most users add one record and never add another. What would you change?
- A scanned lab report is read incorrectly, and the record now shows a wrong value. How should the product prevent and handle this?
Overview: A product design question for a Microsoft product manager role: design an app that lets citizens collect their medical records in one place and pull them up when needed. It tests segment choice, pain points around data capture and sharing, first-release prioritization, health-data privacy and success metrics.