Product design question
How will you deternine the risks associated with online ticketing systems?
- Eventbrite
- 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
Risk assessment thinking for a transaction heavy platform, testing whether the candidate can identify and prioritize real operational risks.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: fraud, technical failure, and customer trust are the three broad risk categories to assess.
- Identify fraud risk: fake or duplicate ticket sales, and bots buying up inventory for resale.
- Identify technical risk: system failure during high demand on sale launch moments, causing lost sales and customer anger.
- Identify trust risk: event cancellations or changes creating refund disputes that damage platform reputation.
- Prioritize fraud and bot prevention as the highest risk, since it directly harms both buyers and event organizers financially.
- Propose mitigations: rate limiting and verification for high demand sales, plus a clear refund policy communicated upfront.
What a strong answer includes
- Structures the answer into distinct risk categories, fraud, technical, and trust, rather than a single blended list.
- Prioritizes fraud and bot activity as the most damaging risk, grounded in real, well documented ticketing industry problems.
- Proposes concrete mitigations, rate limiting for bots and a clear refund policy, tied to each named risk.
- Considers both the buyer and event organizer sides of the risk, since both are harmed by ticket fraud.
Common mistakes
- Lists risks with no prioritization of which matters most.
- Focuses only on technical uptime and ignores fraud, which is the more common real world ticketing problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you detect bot purchasing in real time during a high demand sale?
- How would you balance strict fraud prevention against a smooth checkout experience?
- How would you handle a large event cancellation affecting thousands of ticket holders?
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More questions from Eventbrite
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