Product Sense: Designing an App Feedback Tool, From Capture to Triage and Action
Company: Microsoft
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a tool for collecting customer feedback about an app. Any app may serve as your example. Explain who the tool serves, which problems it solves, how it works from the moment feedback is given to the moment someone acts on it, and how you would measure whether it is working.
```hint Two sides of the same tool
The people giving feedback and the team reading it want different things: one wants to be quick and to feel heard, the other wants input that is representative and actionable. Think about when, inside the app, a request for feedback is welcome rather than an interruption.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the tool built for one app's own team, or offered as a product that many app developers add to their apps?
- Which app will you use as the example, and is it a consumer app or a workplace app where the person who pays may not be the person using it?
- What should the feedback mainly help with: finding bugs, prioritizing feature requests, tracking satisfaction over time, or all of these?
- Are there privacy limits on what the tool may capture automatically, such as screenshots, device details or recent activity?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Both user groups, those who give feedback and the teams who act on it, with the main pain points of each.
- How, when and where feedback is requested, balancing response rate, representativeness and interruption.
- What happens after collection: categorizing, removing duplicates, routing, prioritizing and telling users what changed.
- Success metrics for both sides, with guardrails on user annoyance, privacy and biased samples.
- A prioritized first version and the trade-offs behind it.
### Follow-up Questions
- Most unprompted feedback comes from the happiest and the angriest users. How would you get a picture that represents everyone?
- Feedback volume spikes overnight right after a new release. How should the tool help the team understand what happened?
- How would you show users that their feedback led to a change, and how might that affect the feedback you receive afterwards?
Overview: A product design question asking the candidate to design a tool that gathers customer feedback about an app of their choice. It tests understanding both the users giving feedback and the teams acting on it, deciding when and how to ask, triaging and routing input, and choosing success metrics and guardrails.