Propose improvements to ESPN's digital sports experience for a chosen fan segment
Company: Disney
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
How would you improve ESPN? Choose the product and the fans you want to focus on, then walk through your proposal.
```hint Pick the fan, not the feature
ESPN serves fans who want very different things. Choose one group and one moment in their sports week before you brainstorm.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Should I focus on the ESPN mobile app, its paid streaming, the website or the TV networks?
- Is the goal more engagement from existing fans, more paid streaming subscribers, or reaching younger fans who follow sports mainly through short social video?
- Should I treat league media rights as a fixed constraint on which games and highlights ESPN can show?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear goal tied to how ESPN makes money (attention, subscriptions, advertising) and a reasoned choice of fan segment
- Concrete pain points for that segment at specific moments: before, during and after a game
- Several distinct solutions, prioritized by impact, effort and the limits media rights impose
- A success metric with guardrails, and the main risks of the chosen idea
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you test your top idea before building all of it?
- Which of your ideas might a league or rights partner object to, and how would you handle that?
- How would your answer change if the goal were reducing cancellations of ESPN's paid streaming?
Overview: A product design interview question asking the candidate to improve ESPN's digital sports experience. It tests choosing a fan segment and a business goal, finding concrete game-day pain points, prioritizing solutions under media rights constraints, and defining success metrics with guardrails.