Hawaii Visitor Health-Rule Compliance: Product to Encourage and Enforce COVID Measures
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
The State of Hawaii wants travelers arriving in the state to follow its COVID-19 health guidelines, such as keeping physical distance from others, and it also wants a way to enforce those guidelines. Design a product that helps the state do this.
```hint Separate the reasons people break rules
A traveler may break a guideline because they never learned it, because following it is inconvenient, or because they choose not to. Different product pieces address each reason, so work out where enforcement is really needed and where making compliance easy does more.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which guidelines must the product cover: only distancing and similar behavior in public places, or also entry requirements such as pre-travel testing or quarantine?
- Who builds and runs the product: are you designing it as a Google product offered to the state, or as a service the state commissions and operates itself?
- What enforcement powers does the state actually have, and which actions (warnings, fines, follow-up visits) should the product support versus leave entirely to officials?
- Does "travelers" include returning residents and essential workers as well as tourists?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that balances public health with keeping travel and the local economy running, and a clear choice of primary users among travelers, state officials, businesses and residents.
- A map of the traveler journey (before departure, arrival, during the stay) with the specific compliance problems at each stage.
- Features that make following the rules easy for most travelers, plus a proportionate, human-reviewed enforcement path for the few who do not comply.
- Safeguards for privacy, civil liberties and access (location data, data retention, travelers without smartphones), and resistance to fraud.
- Metrics for compliance and health outcomes, with guardrails on traveler friction, privacy and wrongful accusations.
### Follow-up Questions
- State officials ask you to track every visitor's location continuously for their whole stay. How do you respond?
- Compliance at arrival is high, but crowding at popular beaches and trails keeps drawing complaints from residents. What do you change?
- How should the product wind down once the guidelines are lifted, and what happens to the data it collected?
Overview: A product design question about helping the State of Hawaii get arriving travelers to follow COVID-19 guidelines such as physical distancing, and to enforce them. It tests stakeholder and journey mapping, balancing public health against privacy and tourism, designing proportionate enforcement, and choosing metrics with guardrails.