Product design question
Design a restaurant app like Yelp for restaurant owners.
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
B2B-facing product design: can you design for the business owner (operator), a different user than the typical consumer-facing reviewer app.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a restaurant owner/manager who wants to manage their online reputation and attract more customers.
- Identify pain points: responding to reviews at scale, understanding what's driving negative feedback, and limited visibility into how their listing performs versus competitors.
- Propose core features: a unified review-response dashboard, sentiment/theme analysis of reviews (e.g. 'slow service' mentioned often), and basic listing performance analytics (views, click-through to menu/directions).
- Address monetization: a tiered subscription for advanced analytics and promoted placement, similar to real owner-facing tools in this space.
- Prioritize the review-response and sentiment-analysis features first, since that's the most immediate, actionable pain point for a small business owner.
- Define success: owner engagement (weekly active usage) and measurable improvement in average rating over time for adopters.
What a strong answer includes
- Clearly designs for the owner's operational needs (managing reputation, understanding feedback) rather than reusing consumer-facing review features.
- Proposes sentiment/theme analysis as a concrete, high-value feature that turns raw reviews into actionable insight.
- Grounds monetization in a realistic tiered model, recognizing small business owners are price-sensitive but will pay for clear ROI.
- Chooses a success metric tied to a real business outcome (rating improvement), not just dashboard logins.
Common mistakes
- Designing a consumer-facing review browsing experience instead of an owner-facing management tool.
- Proposing analytics with no clear action the owner can take from them.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you help owners who get overwhelmed by negative reviews respond constructively?
- How would you price this for a single-location restaurant versus a multi-location chain?
More product design questions
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- 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
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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