Product design question
How would you design a trash can?
- Capital One
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Baseline product design fundamentals on a simple, familiar object: can you still apply user needs, constraints, and trade offs rather than jumping to features.
How to approach it
- Define the users and context, assume this is a public trash can for a busy urban sidewalk, since context changes the design completely.
- Identify real needs: easy deposit without touching a dirty surface, enough capacity to avoid overflow, and resistance to pests, weather, and vandalism.
- Prioritize capacity and hygiene over any smart features, since those are the basics that fail most often today, like overflowing bins.
- Propose the design: a large capacity bin with a foot pedal or hands free lid, a liner system for easy emptying, and a small window or sensor to show fill level.
- Consider a simple fill level indicator, like a light or app alert for the sanitation crew, so collection routes can prioritize full bins.
- Define success as overflow incidents and collection efficiency, not the trash can's visual novelty.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the answer in a specific context, urban sidewalk, rather than designing a vague generic trash can.
- Prioritizes solving overflow, the most common real world failure, over adding smart or flashy features.
- Proposes a fill level signal that serves the actual operational user, the sanitation crew, not just the public.
Common mistakes
- Jumping straight to a smart, sensor loaded design without grounding it in a specific context or real failure mode.
- Ignoring the collection and maintenance side of the problem, only considering the person throwing trash away.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would your design differ for a home kitchen versus a public sidewalk?
- What would you cut to keep manufacturing cost low?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
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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