Product design question
As the PM of Instacart, what solution would you design for businesses, and how would it enhance their experience on the platform?
- Instacart
- Product design
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
B2B product design within an existing consumer marketplace, checking whether you can identify what businesses specifically need that differs from individual shoppers.
How to approach it
- Define the business user: local grocers or specialty stores using Instacart to reach customers, distinct from the individual shopper Instacart primarily serves.
- Identify the core pain point: businesses lack visibility into demand forecasting and inventory sync, causing stockouts or overstock that hurt their Instacart listings.
- Prioritize inventory accuracy and demand insight over marketing tools, since stockouts directly damage both the business's revenue and Instacart's customer experience.
- Propose a solution: a business dashboard providing real-time demand forecasting based on Instacart order history, plus automated low-stock alerts tied to actual sales velocity.
- Add a secondary feature: simplified catalog management letting smaller businesses update pricing and availability without needing a dedicated inventory system.
- Define success as reduced stockout-related order cancellations and increased business retention on the platform.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies inventory accuracy as the core unlock, since stockouts directly hurt both business revenue and Instacart's own customer trust, aligning incentives.
- Proposes using Instacart's own order data for demand forecasting, a defensible and unique data advantage over generic inventory tools.
- Ties success to stockout-related cancellations, a metric that reflects real operational improvement, not just dashboard usage.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic marketing or advertising tools without addressing the more fundamental inventory accuracy problem hurting businesses.
- Overengineering the catalog management tool for small businesses that need something simple, not a full enterprise inventory system.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you onboard small businesses with limited technical resources onto this new dashboard?
- How would you balance Instacart's own interests with what's best for the business partner?
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More questions from Instacart
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop