Interview Question: Design a product for malls

1. Assumptions

Owner & manager of mall owner

Westfield is a chain that owns and manages malls globally

PM anywhere

No constraints

Global

2. Product landscape and motivation

Competitors – probably lots of generic B2B tools available for REIT management, vendor management, HR, etc.

Mall business

  • Strengths: have lots of land and buildings in place
  • Weaknesses: customers in perpetual decline
  • Opportunities: re-use land and buildings for other purposes
  • Threats: Amazon / Netflix disrupting customer base

Motivation: Help owners and operators of property manage their land and tenets effectively

3. Target Audience

Malls

  • Large global chains with brand name
    • REIT only
    • Owner & Manager
  • National chains
  • Local malls

Tenets

  • Retail Stores
  • Entertainment - movies, arcades, bars
  • Food vendors
  • Other or new

Financial partners

  • Banks
  • Investors

Other partners

  • Lawyers
  • People mgmt
  • HR

4. Pain points

Managing Tenants - lots of unique tenets

  • Getting foot traffic to malls
  • Finding new tenets
    • Finding anchor tenets
    • Finding other uses for the land and buildings
  • Collecting rent
  • Evicting bad tenets

Managing mall - escape or pivot plan; lots of competition

  • Cleaning people
  • Security
  • Marketing and branding

Financial management - lots of competition, not most painful

  • Accounting
  • Fundraising
  • REIT management
  • Buying & selling

5. Solutions

PivotPlace - App that helps owners find ways to pivot the places in their malls to serve other functions (e.g., pickleball)

  • Vendor matching

RentAI - Use agentic AI to automatically send reminders to tenets to make payments, identify financial problems with them to assess risk and automatically start eviction paperwork as needed

  • Lots of competition
  • Lots of high tech and integrations

CommercialZillow - App that helps match owners of malls with construction companies and other property investors that can repurpose the land for something else (e.g., office buildings)

  • Marketplace for commercial real estate

GoogleMaps2.0 - Get all product inventory from all stores onto an internal map that can be accessed online so customers can find exactly what they want before going to the store.

  • Omni-channel solution

6. Evaluate

malls

Pre-mortem: Might require a very large number of integrations with inventory management and pricing systems

7. MVP

Start on product areas where shoppers want it immediately (e.g., gifts) or hard to find items (e.g., parts, electronics, clothing by size)

Create map and search functionality

P2

  • Create Homepage for discovery
  • Create BOPIS option

Go to market plan

  • Sell to mall owners & operators as well as mid to large retailers
  • Market it in stores and at mall at first, then locally once you get high local inventory online before marketing to users