Product design question

Design an app for cooking.

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

Basic product design skill, choosing a specific user and cooking pain point rather than a generic recipe app.

Pick a specific segment, like busy home cooks who want to use what's already in their fridge, rather than 'people who cook.'
Identify the pain point: deciding what to cook with ingredients on hand, avoiding food waste and extra grocery trips.
Propose a focused feature: an ingredient-based recipe finder matching what users have, prioritizing near-expiry items.
Address retention: weekly meal planning and a shared grocery list to build a habit loop beyond one-off lookups.
Define success as percent of sessions ending in a recipe actually cooked, confirmed via an 'I made this' tap, and weekly active cooking sessions.

Anchors on a specific, real pain point, reducing food waste, instead of a generic recipe-browsing app.
Builds in a habit loop, meal planning and a grocery list, addressing retention, not just a single-use tool.
Defines a success metric tied to actual cooking behavior, not just recipe views.

Designing a generic recipe database indistinguishable from existing apps with no clear differentiator.
No retention mechanism, leaving the app a one-time utility rather than a habitual product.

How would you monetize this without alienating users with ads on a cooking app?
How would you validate that users are actually cooking the recipes, not just browsing?