Product design question
How would you design a wifi network for your city?
- Product design
- Hard
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
Large-scale product design and prioritization skill, since a city-wide network touches infrastructure, equity, and business model tradeoffs.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal and constraints, for example whether this is a free public service, an ad-funded model, or a paid municipal utility, and confirm the city's scale.
- Identify user segments: residents without home broadband, visitors and commuters, and businesses, since needs and willingness to pay differ.
- List pain points: coverage gaps in low-income areas, reliability in dense zones, and security for public networks.
- Propose the design: tiered network with free basic access and a paid or sponsored premium tier, prioritizing coverage in underserved neighborhoods first.
- Address infrastructure tradeoffs briefly, such as mesh nodes on existing city infrastructure like light poles versus new towers.
- Define success as coverage percentage in target underserved areas and average speed reliability, and confirm success metrics with the interviewer.
What a strong answer includes
- Prioritizes digital equity explicitly, naming coverage in underserved neighborhoods as the first rollout wedge rather than dense downtown areas that already have broadband.
- Proposes a concrete funding model as an assumption, for example municipal subsidy plus optional ad-supported premium tier for visitors.
- Addresses a specific infrastructure choice, mesh networking on existing streetlights, to keep cost realistic.
- Sets a measurable target, like 90 percent coverage in target zones within two years, as an assumption.
Common mistakes
- Designing only for dense, already-connected downtown areas and ignoring equity gaps.
- Skipping the funding model entirely, since city-wide wifi is expensive to sustain.
- Not defining any measurable coverage or reliability target.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you fund this network sustainably over five years?
- How would you prioritize rollout order across neighborhoods?
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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