A while back, I wrote about User vs Business Goals in product cases. A subset of that is monetization goals vs. users goals.

At its core, this is the same problem: you want to balance your business and user goals. Most of the time, in a design case, you can keep focused on the user goal. BUT it might help you to also acknowledge high-level business goals in some cases.

For example:

• Improve X 1B+ user product In this case, you might want to mention that your focus is on optimizing the existing user experience over acquisition - unless for example you heard Netflix told investors they were focused on growth - BEFORE you mention your user goal. In this case, you are narrowing your focus and sharing your tradeoffs with your interviewer

  • Side note: Generally speaking, I like to focus on use cases over user personas for this type of “improve prompt”.

• Share some ideas on how to monetize maps. In this case, the prompt requires you to focus on monetization, but you don’t want to lose the user focus.