Product design question
How would you decide whether you should remove the room keys for check-in at hotels? Talk about the design (product and system).
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Combined product and systems design for an operational change with real security and accessibility implications.
How to approach it
- Clarify the decision: whether to replace physical keys with mobile or digital keys, a real, ongoing hospitality trend.
- Identify the upside: faster check-in, lower cost from no key card production or loss replacement, and a better guest experience.
- Identify the risk: guests without smartphones or with dead batteries, and security concerns around digital key vulnerabilities.
- Propose piloting digital keys as opt-in alongside traditional keys, not a full replacement, preserving accessibility.
- On the system side, design time-bound, revocable tokens issued via the hotel app, synced to the door lock over Bluetooth or NFC with an offline fallback.
- Define success as adoption rate among eligible guests and reduced front-desk check-in time, without a rise in lockout or security incidents.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames this correctly as an opt-in transition, not an outright removal, respecting accessibility for guests without smartphones.
- Addresses the system security design explicitly, time-bound revocable tokens, showing real technical grounding.
- Names a concrete failure mode, dead battery or no connectivity, and designs a fallback rather than assuming perfect conditions.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to fully remove physical keys without addressing guests who can't or won't use a smartphone-based system.
- Ignoring security or technical failure modes of the digital key system.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a guest whose phone dies mid-stay?
- How would you measure whether this improves or hurts guest satisfaction?
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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