Design the high-level system for a scalable Maps feature used by families

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Google is a consumer technology, ads, AI, and cloud company; its products include Search, YouTube, Android, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, Workspace, and Google Cloud.

Google Maps is used by families to coordinate everyday movement across school, work, errands, trips, shared places, and safety-related check-ins. In this technical PM interview, you are asked to design a high-level system for a scalable Maps feature built specifically for family use, where multiple users may need to share location-related context, permissions, routes, places, alerts, or plans across devices and accounts.

The problem is not just to describe a consumer-facing feature, but to reason through the system architecture and product trade-offs required to make it work reliably at Google scale. The experience may involve adults, children, caregivers, and household members with different privacy expectations, consent requirements, device capabilities, and usage patterns across regions.

You should frame the user workflow clearly, identify the core product requirements, and translate them into high-level technical components. Consider how the system handles real-time or near-real-time map data, user identity, family relationships, permissions, notifications, state synchronization, abuse prevention, reliability, privacy, and observability without over-designing low-level implementation details.

The experience should consider:

- Family account structure, roles, consent flows, and permission boundaries for location or place-related data

- Core user journeys such as setup, inviting members, sharing context, receiving alerts, managing preferences, and revoking access

- APIs, data models, and service boundaries needed to support Maps, identity, notifications, location, places, and device clients

- Latency, availability, freshness, and scalability expectations for a global consumer product

- Privacy, child safety, data minimization, retention, abuse prevention, and regional compliance considerations

- Offline, low-connectivity, battery, device heterogeneity, and cross-platform behavior

- Rollout strategy, experimentation, monitoring, incident response, and operational guardrails

- Product trade-offs between convenience, safety, accuracy, trust, and user control

Your goal is to define a coherent high-level system and product architecture that could support a trustworthy family-oriented Maps experience at global scale, while explaining the key requirements, constraints, risks, and trade-offs a Google Technical PM would need to manage.