Product design question
Hair salons experience peak customer traffic during specific time periods but remain empty for the rest of the day. Design an MVP to maximize capacity utilization.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
MVP scoping skill for a real capacity-utilization problem, checking whether you can design a minimal, testable solution rather than a fully-featured platform.
How to approach it
- Define the core problem precisely: salons have predictable peak hours, like weekend afternoons, and predictable troughs, like weekday mornings, with fixed capacity going unused.
- Identify the target users: salons wanting to fill idle chair time, and price-sensitive customers willing to shift their visit for a discount.
- Prioritize a simple dynamic pricing and booking mechanism over a full salon management platform, since that's the smallest testable version of the core idea.
- Propose the MVP: a booking widget showing real-time discounted slots during predicted low-traffic hours, with salons setting a minimum discount threshold themselves.
- Keep scope minimal: skip loyalty programs, inventory management, or staff scheduling tools in the first version, focusing only on off-peak booking and pricing.
- Define success as increased chair utilization during previously low-traffic hours and salon retention on the platform after a trial period.
What a strong answer includes
- Scopes the MVP tightly to the core mechanism, off-peak discounted booking, rather than building a broad salon management suite.
- Lets salons set their own discount thresholds, a simple design choice that respects their margin control without requiring complex dynamic pricing algorithms upfront.
- Ties success to utilization during specifically targeted low-traffic hours, the exact problem being solved, not generic booking volume.
Common mistakes
- Overbuilding the MVP with unrelated features like loyalty programs or full scheduling tools before validating the core off-peak booking concept.
- Measuring overall booking volume instead of utilization specifically during previously idle hours, which could mask whether the core problem was actually solved.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent this from just shifting existing peak-hour customers to off-peak instead of adding net-new demand?
- How would you price the platform's fee to salons without hurting their adoption?
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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