Product design question
How do you design a product solution to improve traffic signal obedience by road users (adherence to red/green light) and reduce transgressions in India?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a public-safety behavior change problem, requiring the candidate to identify real causes of non-compliance before proposing a tech solution.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: pedestrian jaywalking, driver red-light running, or both, since the causes and fixes differ.
- Segment causes of non-compliance: genuine unawareness of timing, impatience at long wait times, and habitual risk-taking.
- Identify the highest-leverage cause using traffic violation data, likely long perceived wait times driving impatience-based violations.
- Propose a countdown display showing remaining wait time at both pedestrian and vehicle signals, since visible countdowns are shown to reduce impatience-driven violations.
- Add a secondary fix: adaptive signal timing that shortens unnecessary waits during low cross-traffic periods, addressing the root cause of impatience.
- Define success as a measurable drop in violations per intersection, not just app downloads or awareness campaign reach.
What a strong answer includes
- Diagnoses impatience from long waits as a likely root cause, rather than assuming all violations are due to carelessness.
- Proposes both a behavioral fix (visible countdown) and a systemic fix (adaptive timing), addressing the problem from two angles.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume intersections with visible countdown timers see a meaningful drop in impatience-driven crossings.
- Chooses a measurable, physical-world success metric, violations per intersection, appropriate to a public infrastructure problem.
Common mistakes
- Jumping straight to a fine or enforcement-app solution without first diagnosing why people disobey signals.
- Proposing a purely digital app solution when many violators may not open an app in the moment.
- Not defining a real-world success metric tied to actual violation counts.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle intersections without existing sensor infrastructure?
- What's the trade-off between enforcement and behavioral nudges?
- How would you pilot and measure this before a city-wide rollout?
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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