Product design question

Design a question and answer website like Quora.

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

Product design for a two-sided content marketplace, checking whether you address both askers and answerers, not just the interface.

Clarify the target audience and goal, for example general knowledge-seekers versus a niche expert community, since that shapes moderation and incentive design.
Identify the two sides: people asking questions seeking fast, trustworthy answers, and knowledgeable contributors seeking recognition or reach for answering.
List pain points: low-quality or duplicate answers, difficulty finding trustworthy sources, and low incentive for experts to keep contributing.
Propose the design: a reputation system rewarding high-quality answers, topic-based routing to relevant experts, and a duplicate-question detection flow at the point of asking.
Prioritize the answerer incentive system first, since content supply from credible contributors is usually the harder side of this marketplace to solve.
Define success as answer quality, measured by upvotes or accepted answers per question, and time to first credible answer, confirming scope on whether monetization is included.

Explicitly treats this as a two-sided marketplace problem, prioritizing contributor incentives as the harder supply-side constraint.
Proposes a concrete mechanism, reputation or expertise badges tied to topic areas, to route questions to credible answerers faster.
Addresses content quality directly with duplicate detection at the point of asking, reducing redundant low-value content.
Sets a specific success metric, time to first credible answer, which captures both supply quality and speed.

Designing only the asker-facing interface and ignoring contributor incentives entirely.
Not addressing content quality or duplicate question problems, which plague most Q&A platforms.
Treating this as a single-sided feature design rather than a marketplace with two distinct user needs.

How would you prevent the reputation system from being gamed?
How would you route a question to the right expert without over-relying on manual tagging?