Product design question
Design a product to buy flight tickets.
- Product design
- Easy
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
Fundamentals of product design for a well-understood transactional category, testing whether the candidate can differentiate rather than describe existing booking sites.
How to approach it
- Pick a specific gap in existing flight-booking products, like price-sensitive travelers frustrated by fragmented, changing fares.
- Define the core job: find and book the right flight with confidence, minimizing fear of a better deal appearing later.
- Propose a differentiated feature: price-prediction and fare-lock on the booking flow, addressing the 'will this get cheaper if I wait' pain point.
- Address trust: transparent total pricing with fees included upfront, differentiating from sites with hidden fees.
- Define success as booking conversion rate, and post-purchase price-regret rate, via cancellations or complaints, as a guardrail.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors on a specific, well-known pain point, price uncertainty, instead of listing generic booking features.
- Proposes a differentiated mechanism, price-lock or prediction, rather than a me-too flight search UI.
- Names a guardrail metric tied directly to the trust problem being solved.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic search-and-book flow restating what Expedia or Google Flights already do.
- No stated target user, producing a design that tries to serve everyone and satisfies no one distinctly.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you monetize this without hidden fees, given airlines' commission structures?
- How would you handle flight changes and cancellations in this design?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
More questions from Google
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