Product design question
Design a way to make airport layovers suck less.
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Product design in a well-worn problem space, checking whether you can find a specific, underserved pain point instead of restating generic airport complaints.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a traveler with a 3 to 8 hour layover, distinguishing them from someone with a short connection who has no time to spare.
- Walk their current options: airport lounges, paid day rooms, or just sitting at the gate, all of which are expensive or unpleasant.
- Identify the core pain point: no good low-cost way to rest, store luggage, or explore safely without missing the next flight.
- Prioritize a solution around time certainty, a traveler's biggest fear is missing their connection, over comfort amenities alone.
- Propose a feature: a layover planner that recommends activities or rest options scaled to exact available time, with real-time boarding alerts and luggage storage booking.
- Define success as increased usage of recommended activities and reduced self-reported travel stress during long layovers.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors on time certainty as the top fear, not comfort, which is the sharper and more specific insight most candidates miss.
- Scales recommendations to exact layover duration rather than generic 'things to do' lists, showing personalization thinking.
- Ties the solution to Meta's actual capabilities, location and time-aware notifications, rather than proposing something outside its reach.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic amenities like better lounges without addressing why Meta specifically would build this.
- Ignoring the anxiety around missing a connecting flight, the single biggest driver of a bad layover experience.
Likely follow-up questions
- Why would this live inside Facebook rather than as a standalone app?
- How would you handle flight delay uncertainty in your recommendations?
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More questions from Meta
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