Design a screenless robot: choose its purpose, users and voice-first interaction
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a robot that has no screen. Decide what the robot is for and whom it serves, then explain how you would design it, including how people would control it and get feedback from it without any display.
```hint Let the missing screen shape the choice
Look for a user or setting where a display would be a burden or would not help at all, so that voice, sound, light, touch and the robot's own movement can carry the whole experience.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Does "no screen" rule out only a display on the robot, or also a companion phone app for setup and settings? Are simple status lights allowed?
- Is the robot meant for homes, workplaces or public spaces, and is there a target price for consumers?
- Should the robot build on Google's existing services, such as its voice assistant and smart-home devices, or stand on its own?
- How deep should the design go: the product concept and experience only, or also hardware choices such as sensors and how the robot moves?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A structured comparison of candidate robot ideas and a reasoned choice of one problem and one user segment, treating the lack of a screen as an advantage rather than a gap.
- The chosen users' pain points and why existing products, including smart speakers and phone apps, do not solve them.
- A screenless interaction model: how the robot takes input, gives feedback, recovers from misunderstandings and gets set up.
- A prioritized first version whose hardware and form follow from the use case, with trade-offs stated.
- Success metrics and guardrails, plus the safety, privacy and cost risks of a machine that moves around people.
### Follow-up Questions
- Why does this need to be a robot that moves rather than a cheaper fixed device such as a smart speaker?
- How does a user recover when the robot misunderstands a spoken request and there is no screen to show what went wrong?
- What would change if you had to sell the robot at half the price you planned?
Overview: A product design interview question that asks a PM to invent a robot with no screen, choose whom it serves and explain how it would work. It tests problem and user selection, a screenless interaction model built on voice, sound, light and movement, first-version scope, success metrics, and safety and privacy risks.