Robot Vacuum for Staircases: Users, Form Factor, Safety and Success Metrics
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Robot vacuums like the Roomba clean flat floors on their own, but they are built to stay away from stairs: drop sensors stop them at the edge, so stairs are still cleaned by hand. Design a robot vacuum of this kind that can take care of stairs.
Explain who you would build it for, the problems it has to solve, which product concept you would choose and why, and how you would measure whether it works.
```hint Clean the stairs or cross them
Decide early whether the core job is cleaning the steps themselves, getting a robot from one floor to another, or both. That choice changes the form factor, the target home and what success looks like.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Are we the maker of the existing robot vacuum extending the product line, or a new entrant designing from scratch?
- Is the main job to clean the steps, to let one robot clean several floors, or both?
- Is this for homes only, or also for offices and public buildings with heavily used staircases or escalators?
- Is success about winning new customers or about selling more to people who already own a robot vacuum?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear choice of the core job and a target segment, with reasons
- Pain points tied to real stair conditions: carpeted versus hard treads, edges and back corners, varying step sizes, landings and curved flights
- Several form-factor concepts compared on autonomy, safety, installation and cost, with a reasoned pick
- Safety treated as a launch requirement: falls, children, pets and objects left on the steps
- Success metrics for cleaning quality and autonomy, with guardrails for incidents and returns
### Follow-up Questions
- Engineering says a fully autonomous climbing robot will cost far more than the flagship floor robot and arrive much later than planned. What do you ship first?
- How would the design change for an escalator in a mall or a staircase in an office building?
- Beta users report that the robot sometimes stalls halfway down a flight. How do you respond, both in the product and in the rollout?
Overview: A product design question asking how you would build a Roomba-style robot vacuum that can handle stairs. It tests choosing the core job and target households, understanding stair-specific pain points, comparing form-factor concepts on autonomy, safety and cost, and defining success metrics with safety guardrails.