Product design question

Design a system for structuring daily schedules in a high school.

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

Tests systems design thinking applied to a constrained operational problem: scheduling under real world resource and rule constraints.

Clarify the users: school administrators building the master schedule, teachers with availability limits, and students needing conflict free courses.
List the constraints: teacher headcount per subject, room capacity, mandatory course sequences, and student elective preferences.
Frame it as a constraint satisfaction problem: assign courses to time slots and rooms while respecting all hard constraints first.
Propose the system: an intake form for teacher availability and room inventory, then an optimizer that flags unresolvable conflicts for manual review.
Define success as percentage of students with zero schedule conflicts and administrator hours saved versus manual scheduling.
Confirm with the interviewer whether this is for one school or a district with shared resources across schools.

Separates hard constraints, like one teacher cannot be in two rooms at once, from soft preferences, like a student's preferred elective time.
Proposes an admin facing conflict resolution view that surfaces the few unsolvable cases rather than silently dropping courses.
Gives a concrete success metric, for example reducing manual scheduling time from a stated number of days to hours per semester.
Notes the need for a change management flow, since teacher absences or room closures require re running the schedule quickly.

Treating this as a simple calendar app instead of a constraint satisfaction problem with hard and soft rules.
Ignoring the manual override and conflict resolution workflow administrators will actually need.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.