Product design question
Design Ticketmaster.
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product design for a marketplace with a notoriously painful, widely reported user experience around fees and bots.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: assume the consumer-facing event-ticket purchase experience, the well-known pain area.
- Identify users: fans wanting fair access to tickets, and venues and artists wanting sold-out shows and anti-scalping protection.
- Surface the best-known pain points: bot-driven scalping making tickets unavailable at face value, and surprise fees at checkout.
- Prioritize the queueing and bot-fairness problem first, the most reputation-damaging, widely-cited issue.
- Propose verified-fan registration with randomized queue assignment plus real-time bot detection, and upfront, all-in pricing at browse time rather than surprise fees.
- Define success as reduced bot-purchased ticket share and lower checkout abandonment from fee shock.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the redesign in the platform's actual, well-documented real-world problems, bots and fee transparency, rather than generic e-commerce advice.
- Prioritizes fairness and anti-bot mechanisms as the highest-impact fix given how reputation-damaging scalping controversies have been.
- Proposes upfront pricing as a concrete fix to checkout abandonment, a measurable, well-known e-commerce lever.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic ticket-buying UI without addressing the scalping or bot problem that defines the real reputation issue.
- Ignoring the venue and artist side of the marketplace.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you balance anti-bot friction against making checkout fast for real fans?
- How would you handle resale or secondary market tickets in this design?
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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