Product design question
Design a podcast feature for Instagram.
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product design for a new content format: can you define the user and creator jobs, and design a feature that fits Instagram's existing behavior rather than bolting on a foreign format.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: are we designing for listeners discovering podcasts, or creators repurposing existing shows.
- Identify the gap: Instagram is visual/short-form, so long-form audio doesn't fit native behavior without adaptation.
- Propose the format: short audio/video clips ('trailers') from episodes, surfaced in Reels or Stories, linking out to full episodes.
- Explain the creator side: a simple tool to auto-clip highlights from an uploaded episode with captions.
- Address discovery: how clips get recommended in the existing Reels feed rather than a separate tab nobody visits.
- Define success: clip-to-full-episode click-through rate and creator adoption rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the design in Instagram's actual strength (short, visual, algorithmic feed) instead of copying Spotify/Apple Podcasts wholesale.
- Solves the discovery problem explicitly, since a standalone podcast tab would get little traffic without feed integration.
- Gives creators a low-effort way to produce content (auto-clipping) since podcasters won't manually edit for a new platform.
- Names a clear north-star metric: click-through from clip to full episode, not just clip views.
Common mistakes
- Designing a full podcast player as if Instagram were Spotify, ignoring that users don't come to Instagram for long-form audio.
- Ignoring the creator's incremental effort required to produce content for yet another platform.
Likely follow-up questions
- Where in the app would you surface this so it doesn't get buried?
- How would you convince podcasters it's worth the extra production effort?
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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