Product design question

Design a new product that is visual to organize guests to sit by others with a common interest

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Novel product design for a social discovery use case, requiring the candidate to define a clear job and a believable mechanism.

Clarify the context: a conference, wedding, or general event seating scenario, since the design changes with context.
Identify the core job: helping strangers with shared interests sit together to spark better conversation.
Identify the input: guests provide interests or professional background ahead of the event.
Propose a solution: an algorithm that clusters guests by shared interest into seating groups, with host override control.
Address the tradeoff: balancing interest based clustering against existing social ties like couples or existing friend groups.
Define success with self reported conversation quality and repeat usage by event organizers.

Picks a specific event context, a conference, rather than trying to design one tool for every possible gathering.
Names the real design tension, interest clustering versus respecting existing relationships like couples, and addresses it directly.
Proposes a concrete mechanism, a pre event interest survey feeding a clustering algorithm with host override.
Sets a meaningful metric, self reported conversation quality, appropriate for a product whose value is experiential.

Designs a generic seating chart tool with no real interest matching mechanism.
Ignores the tension between algorithmic matching and respecting known relationships like couples or families.

How would you handle guests who decline to share their interests?
How would this tool make money for event organizers?
How would you validate that better seating actually leads to better conversations?