Gmail product improvement: redesign the experience of unsent email drafts
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager on Gmail. When someone starts writing an email and does not send it, Gmail keeps it as a draft they can come back to later. How would you improve the way Gmail handles drafts?
```hint Follow a draft from start to finish
A draft is started, left, found again, perhaps edited on another device, and finally sent, discarded or forgotten. Look for the step where the people you choose to serve get stuck.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which users should the improvement target: personal Gmail users or business users on Google Workspace, and on the phone, the web or both?
- What outcome matters most: more of the emails people start actually getting sent, less time spent writing, or fewer forgotten and stale drafts?
- Are AI writing aids in scope, or should the focus be on how drafts are saved, found, resumed and finished?
- Does the work cover only what people see and do with drafts in the web and mobile apps, or also the behind-the-scenes reliability of when drafts get saved and how they sync between devices?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear goal for the drafts experience and a chosen user segment, with the reason for the choice.
- Pain points across the life of a draft, grounded in how different people actually use drafts.
- Solutions tied to those pain points, prioritized by impact and effort, that account for what Gmail already offers.
- Success metrics for the chosen solutions, with guardrails against nagging and privacy concerns.
- Risks and edge cases, such as people who keep drafts as personal notes.
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you tell an abandoned draft from one the user is keeping on purpose, and why does the difference matter for your design?
- Your change raises the share of drafts that get sent but also raises the rate at which users switch off Gmail notifications. What do you do?
- How would your answer change for teams whose emails need a manager's or a legal reviewer's approval before they go out?
Overview: A Gmail product improvement exercise about drafts: how people start, leave, find, resume and finish emails they have not sent. It tests choosing a user segment, mapping pain points across a draft's life, prioritizing solutions against features Gmail already offers, and defining success metrics with guardrails.