Product design question
Design a bike program for Google's Mountain View campus.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design on a physical-operations problem: designing a shared resource system for a specific known campus context.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal: reduce car trips and ease intra-campus travel for Google employees at Mountain View.
- Identify users: employees moving between buildings for meetings, and visitors needing occasional short trips.
- Design the core flow: bike pickup at stations, GPS tracking, and easy dropoff near any building.
- Address operational constraints, like bike maintenance, redistribution to high-demand stations, and weather.
- Define success as trips per bike per day and reduced shuttle or car usage between buildings.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the design in the real known campus layout and Google's existing shuttle system rather than a generic bike-share pitch.
- Addresses redistribution explicitly, since bikes will cluster at popular buildings without active rebalancing.
- Proposes a concrete metric, e.g. targeting 4 trips per bike per day as a utilization target.
- Considers integration with Google's internal calendar, suggesting bike availability near a meeting location.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic public bike-share system with no campus-specific detail.
- Ignoring bike redistribution and maintenance operations.
- Not defining a metric to judge whether the program succeeds.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle bike redistribution during peak commute hours?
- How would you measure whether this reduces car or shuttle usage?
- What would you do about bike theft or damage on campus?
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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