Product design question
How would you build a product for a tablet launched in restaurants?
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a B2B hardware and software product serving both restaurant operators and diners.
How to approach it
- Define both users: diners wanting a quick, easy way to order and pay, and restaurant owners wanting higher table turnover and lower labor cost.
- List pain points: slow wait times for a server to take orders or bring the check, and restaurants needing more staff during peak hours.
- Prioritize core features: menu browsing, ordering, and pay-at-table, since these directly reduce wait and turnover time.
- Design for restaurant operators: an easy way to update menus and prices without needing engineering support.
- Address monetization: charge restaurants a subscription or per-transaction fee, since diners shouldn't be charged directly.
- Define success as table turnover time reduction and restaurant retention after a trial period.
What a strong answer includes
- Designs for both sides explicitly, diner convenience and restaurant operational efficiency, rather than only one.
- Names a concrete operational benefit, faster table turnover, which restaurants care about more than diner delight alone.
- Proposes a self-serve menu management tool for restaurant owners, addressing a real operational pain point.
- Picks a business-relevant metric, restaurant retention, alongside a diner-facing metric like order completion time.
Common mistakes
- Designing only for the diner experience and ignoring restaurant operator needs and incentives.
- Ignoring monetization and who actually pays for the tablet and software.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you price this for restaurants of different sizes?
- How would you handle restaurants that don't want to change their existing workflow?
More product design questions
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- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
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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