Product design question
Build a product to find a contractor.
- Qualcomm
- 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.
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What this question tests
Marketplace product design: solving the classic two-sided trust and matching problem for local services.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: homeowners needing a contractor versus contractors seeking work, and note this is a two-sided marketplace.
- Identify the core pain point: trust (is this contractor reliable and fairly priced) and matching (finding the right specialty).
- Design the core flow: post a job with details, get vetted contractor bids, compare reviews and price, and book.
- Address the cold-start problem: how to get enough contractors onboarded before demand exists.
- Define success as completed jobs per month and repeat usage rate from homeowners.
What a strong answer includes
- Treats this explicitly as two-sided, addressing both contractor supply and homeowner demand.
- Solves trust with verified reviews and license/insurance checks, the category's biggest barrier.
- Proposes a concrete cold-start strategy, like manually recruiting contractors in one city first.
- Uses an assumed metric, e.g. targeting 500 completed jobs in the first quarter in one market.
Common mistakes
- Designing only the homeowner-facing search experience and ignoring contractor supply.
- Ignoring trust and verification, which is the hardest part of this category.
- No plan for solving the cold-start problem in a new market.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you solve the cold-start problem in a new city?
- How would you handle a dispute between a homeowner and contractor?
- How would you price the platform, e.g. commission versus subscription?
More product design questions
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- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Design a new feature for Twitter that improves the new user’s experience.Twitter · Product design · Medium
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How do you design an app for on-demand beauty services?Product design · Medium
More questions from Qualcomm
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