Product design question
Design an elevator.
- Product design
- Easy
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
Fundamentals of product design applied to a familiar physical system: can you reason about safety, throughput, and accessibility trade offs rather than listing generic features.
How to approach it
- Define the context, assume a mid rise office building elevator, since building type changes the design priorities significantly.
- Identify core needs: safety (reliable stopping and emergency systems), throughput (minimizing wait and travel time during peak hours like morning arrival), and accessibility for wheelchair users and those with visual impairments.
- Prioritize safety first as a non negotiable baseline, then throughput, since elevator wait time is the most common daily frustration in office buildings.
- Design for throughput: destination dispatch, where users select their floor before boarding so the system groups riders efficiently, reducing stops per trip.
- Design for accessibility: audio floor announcements, braille buttons, and adequate door hold time, built in as standard, not optional add ons.
- Define success as average wait time during peak hours and safety incident rate, not just a smooth ride feel.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors the design in a specific context, office building peak hours, rather than a generic elevator description.
- Proposes destination dispatch, a real, proven throughput solution, showing genuine domain awareness.
- Treats accessibility as a core requirement, not an afterthought, which distinguishes a strong answer.
Common mistakes
- Describing generic elevator mechanics with no consideration of context, like building type or peak usage.
- Treating accessibility as optional rather than a baseline requirement.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would destination dispatch change during a fire evacuation scenario?
- How would your design differ for a residential building versus an office tower?
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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