Product design question
Design a carpooling app for women developed by Uber.
- Uber
- Product design
- Hard
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
Product design for a safety-focused variant of an existing service, requiring the candidate to address both real and perceived safety, plus a two-sided rollout challenge.
How to approach it
- Identify the core need: a documented gap in women's comfort using ride-hailing, especially at night, driven by safety concerns on both sides, driver and rider.
- Design core safety mechanics: verified women drivers matched with women riders, an in-app safety button with live-location sharing to a trusted contact, and driver background-check transparency.
- Address the two-sided supply challenge explicitly: this requires actively recruiting and verifying enough women drivers, or the feature will have long wait times and fail to deliver on its promise.
- Address rollout risk: starting in a limited set of cities with strong women-driver supply before expanding broadly, rather than launching everywhere with thin supply.
- Define success as wait time for matched rides versus the standard product, and rider-reported safety-perception score, with driver supply growth as a guardrail.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly treats driver supply as the binding constraint, not just a feature toggle on the rider side, showing marketplace thinking.
- Names concrete safety mechanics, verified matching, live-location sharing, background-check transparency, rather than a vague 'safety mode.'
- Proposes a staged city rollout tied to supply readiness, avoiding a broken promise at launch.
Common mistakes
- Designing only rider-facing safety features while ignoring the driver-supply constraint that determines whether the feature actually works at scale.
- Launching broadly without addressing wait times, which would undermine trust in the feature immediately.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you recruit enough women drivers to make this viable at launch?
- How would you handle a city where women-driver supply never reaches a usable level?
More product design questions
- How would you improve the Uber app?Lyft · Product design · Easy
- How would you design at ETA system for Lyft drivers?Lyft · Product design · Medium
- Design Lyft for kids.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve the restaurant search?Uber · Product design · Easy
- How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?Google · Product design · Medium
More questions from Uber
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