Product sense: a new app for remembering, planning and celebrating birthdays
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design an app built around birthdays.
```hint Pick a person and a moment
A birthday involves the person celebrating, the people who organize something for them, and the guests who simply turn up. Choose one of them and one moment (remembering the date, planning, the day itself, or afterwards), and ask what phones, social networks and group chats already handle at that moment.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Are we a new standalone app, or a feature inside an existing platform that already holds contacts, a friend graph and calendar data?
- What should the first version achieve: user growth, repeat use between birthdays, or revenue from gifts and bookings?
- Whose birthdays are in scope: friends, children's parties, family members or coworkers?
- Does the app stop at remembering and greeting, or does it also cover planning the celebration, such as gifts, venue, guest list and shared costs?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated goal and a chosen segment (the birthday person, the organizer or the guests; friends, parents or coworkers), justified by how often the need arises and how painful it is.
- The journey from reminder through planning, the day itself and the memories afterwards, with pain points ranked.
- An MVP that offers something calendars, social networks and group chats do not already do, and a clear reason people would install it.
- How the product keeps users when each person's birthdays come only a few times a year, plus success metrics and guardrails.
- Risks such as the sensitivity of birth dates and contact data, the cold start when friends are not on the app, and spoiled surprises.
### Follow-up Questions
- Organizers already coordinate in group chats. Why would they plan in your app instead, and how do you avoid asking every guest to install it?
- How would you make money without turning a celebration into a sales funnel?
- What changes if the target is parents planning a child's party rather than a group of friends?
Overview: A product sense question asking a Product Manager to design a new app centered on birthdays. It tests picking a goal and a target user such as the group organizer, mapping the celebration journey, prioritizing pain points beyond simple reminders, and choosing success metrics for a product people need only a few times a year.