Product design question
How would you design a customized e-commerce platform for users?
- Walmart
- 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 ecommerce personalization design: can you scope 'customized' concretely (what is being personalized, for whom) rather than a vague 'make it feel personal' answer.
How to approach it
- Clarify what 'customized' means here: personalized homepage and search results based on shopping history, location-based assortment (a customer near a store sees relevant local inventory), and tailored promotions.
- Identify the core user pain point: Walmart's massive catalog makes discovery hard, so customization should primarily reduce the effort to find relevant products, not just show more ads.
- Design the core mechanism: a personalized homepage that reorders categories based on past purchase patterns (grocery reorder shortcuts for a frequent grocery shopper, browsing history-based recommendations for others).
- Add a location layer: since Walmart blends online and in-store, surface local store stock and pickup options prominently for a customer's specific store, not a generic national catalog view.
- Address a real constraint: personalization needs a cold-start plan for new or infrequent users with little history, defaulting to popular items in their region rather than a blank or generic experience.
- Define success as conversion rate lift on the personalized homepage/search versus a control, and repeat purchase rate for frequently reordered items.
What a strong answer includes
- Scopes 'customized' into concrete surfaces (homepage ordering, search ranking, local assortment) rather than a vague personalization claim.
- Uses Walmart's actual differentiator, its store network, to add a location-based customization layer that a pure online retailer could not replicate as easily.
- Addresses the cold-start problem explicitly for new or low-history users, a common gap in personalization designs.
- Picks conversion and repeat-purchase metrics that map directly to the stated goal of easier discovery.
Common mistakes
- Treating 'customized' as only meaning 'show a recommendation carousel' without addressing search ranking or homepage structure.
- Ignoring Walmart's omnichannel advantage (physical stores, local stock) as a customization lever unique to Walmart versus a pure online competitor.
- No plan for users with little to no purchase history.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test personalization changes without hurting discovery of new products?
- How would you handle a customer who shops for both personal and business/bulk needs?
- What would you do if personalization increased conversion but reduced average order diversity?
More product design questions
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- Develop a seller score algorithm for Walmart Marketplace.Walmart · Product design · Hard
- How can Google help improve the grocery shopping experience of users?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- Design a Supermarket for older people.Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Facebook for commuters?Walmart · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Uber?PayPal · Product design · Easy
More questions from Walmart
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