Product design question
Design Uber Eats' APIs so restaurants can send over their data.
- Carta
- 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
Tests API and platform product thinking, designing for a developer or partner audience rather than end consumers.
How to approach it
- Clarify the data being sent: menu items, pricing, availability, order status, with the interviewer.
- Identify the user: POS integrators and larger chains, not individual owners typing manually.
- Design the core contract: a REST or webhook API for menu sync and order-status callbacks.
- Prioritize reliability: idempotent updates and clear versioning, since a broken sync loses restaurants money.
- Provide a fallback dashboard UI for smaller restaurants without technical staff.
- Define success as the percentage of menu updates reflected within a target latency, and fewer cancellations.
What a strong answer includes
- Designs for the real audience, POS vendors and larger chains, instead of assuming every restaurant codes.
- Adds a fallback UI for restaurants with no technical resources.
- Picks a success metric tied to the real business pain of stale data causing cancellations.
Common mistakes
- Designing only for technical partners and ignoring small restaurants.
- No handling of sync latency or idempotency, which causes real order errors.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a restaurant with unreliable internet connectivity?
- How would you version this API without breaking existing integrations?
- What would you measure to know restaurants are adopting it?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- You are a PM at Flipkart. The company has decided to increase the userbase of age >60 years on the platform. What will you do?Flipkart · Product design · Hard
- Develop a seller score algorithm for Walmart Marketplace.Walmart · Product design · Hard
- Design an application launching in the US marketplace that enables patients to find doctors.Meta · Product design · Hard
More questions from Carta
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