Product design question
How do you design an app for on-demand beauty services?
- Product design
- Medium
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 product design from scratch for a two-sided, trust-and-scheduling-heavy service marketplace, requiring the candidate to identify both customer and provider needs.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: on-demand beauty services (e.g., haircuts, manicures, makeup) delivered at the customer's home or a nearby salon, confirm this is a two-sided marketplace connecting customers and independent beauty professionals.
- Identify customer pain points: uncertainty about provider quality/skill, scheduling friction (finding a provider available at a convenient time), and trust around having someone come to their home.
- Identify provider pain points: unpredictable demand/income, time wasted on no-shows or last-minute cancellations, and difficulty showcasing their specific skills/portfolio to stand out.
- Prioritize by the core trust and matching problem: build a strong profile/portfolio system (photos of past work, verified reviews, specialties) and a reliable real-time scheduling/availability system as the two foundational pillars.
- Address safety, since this involves in-home visits: identity verification for providers, in-app tracking/ETA sharing for customers, and a secure in-app payment system to avoid cash-handling friction and disputes.
- Define success: booking completion rate (browsed to booked), provider utilization rate (booked hours / available hours), and repeat booking rate for both customers and providers, since marketplace health needs both sides to be measured.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly designs for both sides of the marketplace (customer and provider) with distinct pain points, rather than only thinking from the customer's perspective.
- Identifies safety and trust (in-home visits, identity verification, ETA sharing) as a first-class design requirement given the specific nature of this service, not an afterthought.
- Names provider utilization rate as a key metric, showing understanding that marketplace health requires balancing supply, not just demand.
- Prioritizes portfolio/trust and scheduling reliability as the two foundational features rather than listing many shallow feature ideas.
Common mistakes
- Designing only for the customer side and ignoring provider needs, which breaks a two-sided marketplace.
- Ignoring safety concerns specific to at-home personal services.
- Measuring success with only demand-side metrics (bookings) with no supply-side health metric like provider utilization or churn.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a bad match (customer unhappy with the service) after the fact?
- How would you balance supply and demand during peak times like weekends?
- How would you verify provider quality before they get their first booking?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- You’ve just joined Meta and have been tasked with launching a new product to help people at home during emergencies. What would you build?Meta · Product design · Medium
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Design a new feature for Twitter that improves the new user’s experience.Twitter · Product design · Medium
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- Design an app for making someone a better cook.Lyft · Product design · Medium
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