Product design question
How would you design Lyft for commuters?
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a specific, price-sensitive, habitual user segment distinct from Lyft's typical occasional-ride use case.
How to approach it
- Clarify the segment: daily commuters riding the same route at the same time, price-sensitive and reliability-focused, unlike occasional riders.
- Identify pain points: standard rideshare pricing is too costly for daily use, and pickup time variability is unacceptable when catching a train or starting work.
- Design a commuter subscription: a discounted flat monthly rate for a fixed route and time window, with guaranteed pickup windows.
- Add carpool matching with other commuters on the same route to further cut cost and improve driver availability at peak hours.
- Define success as subscriber retention month over month, on-time pickup rate, and cost per ride relative to standard Lyft pricing.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the design in a real precedent, Lyft's past commute-focused pilots, showing awareness of feasibility.
- Prioritizes reliability and price over novelty features, correctly identifying commuters' actual top concerns.
- Ties carpool matching to solving peak-hour driver supply, a real operational constraint.
Common mistakes
- Designing generic rideshare features without addressing the price sensitivity that defines this segment.
- Ignoring driver supply constraints during the exact peak commute hours this product depends on.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you guarantee driver supply during peak commute hours?
- How would you price the subscription to stay profitable against standard rides?
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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