Estimation question

Estimate the number of restaurants in Mumbai.

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

Whether you can build a clean bottom-up estimate for an unfamiliar city using stated, reasonable assumptions.

Confirm scope: all restaurants, including small eateries and street food stalls, or only formal sit-down restaurants.
Start from Mumbai's population, roughly 12 to 13 million people in the city proper.
Estimate households or people per restaurant based on dining density in a dense Indian metro, since eating out is common.
State an assumption, such as roughly 1 restaurant per 400 to 600 people given how common small eateries are.
Divide population by that ratio to get a restaurant count, and sanity check against known dense-city restaurant density elsewhere.
Present the result as a range and flag which assumption, dining-out frequency or restaurant density, most affects the answer.

Uses a density-based bottom-up method, population divided by people per restaurant, rather than guessing a round number.
States the restaurant density assumption explicitly and explains why it fits a dense Indian metro context.
Sanity checks the result against a comparable known dense city rather than leaving it unchecked.
Presents a range instead of false precision, and names the most sensitive assumption.

Giving a single guessed number with no visible method or stated assumptions.
Ignoring that a dense Indian metro likely has a much higher restaurant-to-population ratio than a typical US city.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.