Design a Toothbrush for young children? Product Management Interview Question

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TechnoManagers is the complete guide for Product Management and Quant Interview preparation.


Interviewer: Design a toothbrush for young children?

Shailesh: Okay, let me ask a couple of quick questions to comprehend the question. The term young children are subjective, so is there any specific age range we looking at?
Interviewer: You can assume the age range to be 4–10.

Shailesh: Alright! one more question, our goal is to make the physical toothbrush or are we looking at a toothbrush accompanied with some mobile app or software?
Interviewer: You can decide as you go.

Shailesh: Okay, so let me reiterate our goal; we are going to design the toothbrush for young children aged between 4-10.

Shailesh: The way I would like to approach this problem is first will see our customer segment and their user journey and, depending on that, will see some of the pain points. After prioritising the pain points, we can see some potential solutions in priority and corresponding success metrics. Last we can think of some of the potential tradeoffs or some future aspects of the solution.
Interviewer: Okay

Shailesh: These will be our customer segment

  1. Young children [Primary users]
  2. Parents
  1. Got reminded if forget to brush their teeth by their parents/elder siblings
  2. Started brushing
  3. Brush their teeth for a random time
  4. Wash the brush, rinse the mouth and put it back
  1. Young children tend to forget to brush their teeth or don’t like brushing; it’s a tedious activity for them.
  2. They don’t know how much time they have to brush; a study suggests that children end up brushing their teeth less than average brushing time due to this ambiguity.
  3. They don’t know if they have done brushing neatly and cleaned the majority of the area.
  4. They are generally not aware if they have developed cavities in their teeth etc. study suggests that people visit a dentist after a lot of damage has been done.

I think the pain point #1, #2 and #3 are more essential than #4 because if they have been brushed daily for a reasonable amount of time, then its’s improbable that they will get a cavity, but we can see that as well in a later stage.

So I will be designing an intelligent toothbrush accompanied by a digital app. Following will be the features to solve the above pain points.

  1. Since they are young children, the toothbrush will be in the shape of their superheroes or have colourful themes to lure children and make it less boring. It will be a vibrating toothbrush which is easily chargeable and has great battery life. [Must have]
  2. It is also fitted with waterproof audio sensors and innovative bristles. This audio sensor will keep reminding them how much more they have to brush their teeth. Like after a minute, it will say 1 minute up and 2 minutes more, something of that sort. [Should have]
  3. The intelligent and vibrating bristles will automatically apply varying pressure and help clean the majority of the area neatly. [Must have]
  4. The data from the sensors will automatically go into the app, where parents can see how much time their children have brushed, have skipped or not? If immediate attention requires or time to visit the dentist. [Must have]
  5. There can be another fancy projector fitted on the lower side of the brush that can show a short 3–4 minutes animatic video and help children make it less boring. [Nice to have]

For prioritising the solutions, we can see what the solution are is a must in our MVP.

I think vibrating toothbrushes with colourful themes, fitted with intelligent bristles and analytics, are must-have solutions we can consider putting into MVP. The other solution can be implemented in future after testing this hypothesis.

We can also collaborate with some medical insurance companies or dentists in the future. Advance data analytics can give us valuable insights which can be used in personalised offerings and suggestions. It can be a good business model for monetisation.


# of toothbrushes sold
% increase in the average duration of brushing time
% decrease in the number of days when brushing teeth is skipped

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