Product design question
How would you build a new product for an artist?
- 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
Product design creativity: identifying a real pain point for a creative professional segment and proposing a focused solution.
How to approach it
- Clarify the artist type: visual artists, musicians, or writers, and pick one to focus the design.
- Identify the core pain point, such as difficulty monetizing work directly or reaching a dedicated fan base.
- Propose a concrete feature, like a direct-support tool combining exclusive content drops with fan messaging.
- Consider competition, since Patreon and similar tools already exist, and identify a differentiator.
- Define success as monthly recurring revenue generated per artist and fan retention rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks one artist type (e.g. musicians) instead of trying to serve all creative professions generically.
- Names a concrete differentiator against Patreon, like tighter integration with a specific platform's existing audience.
- Addresses monetization directly, proposing a specific revenue share model as an assumption.
- Uses an assumed metric, e.g. targeting 200 dollars average monthly recurring revenue per active artist.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic 'creator platform' with no differentiation from Patreon or Substack.
- Ignoring the two-sided nature of artist supply and fan demand.
- Not defining a monetization model or success metric.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this differentiate from Patreon specifically?
- How would you solve the cold-start problem of getting both artists and fans?
- What would you prioritize for a first version?
More product design questions
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- 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
- How do you design an app for on-demand beauty services?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