Product design question
Design a contactless ride experience for Uber.
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
Product design for reducing physical contact in a ride-hailing trip, addressing both driver and rider safety concerns.
How to approach it
- Identify the users: riders and drivers both concerned about health and safety risk from close proximity in a shared vehicle.
- Name pain points: payment already largely contactless in-app, so the remaining friction is physical interaction at pickup (confirming rider identity) and inside the vehicle (barrier, mask compliance).
- Propose solutions: an app-based verification flow at pickup (driver confirms rider via app code, minimizing verbal exchange), and in-trip features like a reported mask compliance or air quality/ventilation indicator.
- Prioritize the pickup verification flow first since it is the highest-frequency, most universal contact point across every single trip.
- Define success as rider and driver reported comfort ratings and reduction in trip cancellations due to safety concerns.
What a strong answer includes
- Recognizes that payment was already contactless, and correctly narrows the real remaining friction to pickup verification and in-vehicle interaction.
- Balances both sides of the two sided marketplace, driver and rider safety, rather than designing only for the rider.
- Picks a dual-sided success metric, both rider and driver comfort ratings, appropriate for a marketplace product.
Common mistakes
- Proposing payment related fixes that ignore Uber already had contactless payment as a baseline.
- Designing only for rider comfort while ignoring driver safety concerns, which matter equally in a two sided marketplace.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you verify mask or safety compliance without being invasive?
- How would you measure whether these features actually reduced cancellations due to safety concerns?
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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