Design an In-App Guide That Helps L'Oreal Shoppers Choose the Right Beauty Products
Company: L'Oreal
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager working on L'Oreal's mobile app. Shoppers find it hard to work out which cosmetics product suits them best, so they turn to blogs and influencers for advice instead. How would you approach creating buying guides inside the app that help them choose? Explain who the guides are for, what makes choosing hard, what the guides would include, what you would build first and how you would measure success.
```hint Learn from where shoppers go today
Shoppers already have sources they trust for this decision. Think about what blogs and influencers give them that a brand's app currently does not, and which of those things an app could do even better.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Is this one app covering many of L'Oreal's brands or a single brand's app, and does it sell products directly or send shoppers to retailers?
- Which categories should the guides cover first: makeup, skincare, hair care or all of them?
- Should the guides recommend only L'Oreal products, and what should happen when nothing in the range suits a shopper well?
- Is success measured by sales through the app, fewer returns, or shoppers trusting the app as an advisor?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal for the guides that connects the stated problem (shoppers relying on outside advice) to L'Oreal's business.
- Shopper segments and a reasoned choice of whom to serve first.
- What makes choosing hard, mapped to guide features that personalize the choice and earn trust, prioritized into a first version.
- How the guides stay credible rather than reading as advertising, including disclosure, regulated claims and accurate matching across all skin tones.
- Success metrics that capture good choices rather than page views, plus guardrails and risks such as the privacy of face and skin data.
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you measure whether a guide helped someone choose well, rather than just making a sale?
- Would you bring influencers into the app, and how would you keep their content credible?
- A selfie-based skin analysis collects sensitive data. How would you handle consent, storage and deletion?
Overview: A product design case for L'Oreal: shoppers struggle to pick the right cosmetics and turn to blogs and influencers instead, so you design buying guides inside the company's mobile app. It tests shopper segmentation, personalization, earning trust, prioritizing features and choosing success metrics beyond sales.