Product design question
Design an ATM for airports.
- Stripe
- Salesforce
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests designing for a specific, time-pressured, high-throughput context rather than a generic ATM redesign.
How to approach it
- Identify the airport user's unique needs: time pressure before a flight, frequent foreign travelers needing currency exchange, and a need for larger, less common cash denominations for tips or local spending.
- Prioritize speed: a fast-lane mode with saved preferences for frequent travelers (preferred amount, preferred currency) to cut transaction time.
- Add multi-currency support: dynamic currency conversion with transparent fee display, since travelers are a core airport ATM segment.
- Address location-specific placement: near security exits and gates, not just baggage claim, since travelers need cash at multiple points in transit.
- Define success: average transaction time and successful-withdrawal rate, since speed and reliability matter more here than at a typical street-corner ATM.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the airport context's specific constraints, time pressure and currency diversity, rather than redesigning a generic ATM.
- Proposes a concrete speed feature (saved preferences, fast-lane mode) tailored to a repeat business traveler's real behavior.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume the average airport ATM transaction takes 45 seconds and targets cutting it to 20 seconds for frequent travelers.
- Addresses currency exchange transparency, since hidden fees are a well-known traveler pain point and trust risk at airport ATMs.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic ATM without addressing what's actually different about the airport context.
- Ignoring currency conversion transparency, a major and well-documented traveler complaint about airport financial services.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle fraud risk given the high volume of one-time foreign-card users?
- How would you decide how many ATMs and where to place them in a large airport?
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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