Product design question
How would you improve Instacart?
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
Product improvement for a marketplace app: can you find a real friction point across discovery, substitution, and delivery rather than proposing generic features.
How to approach it
- Define the user job: get accurate, complete grocery orders delivered reliably and quickly.
- Identify pain points: out-of-stock item substitutions that don't match preference, unpredictable delivery windows, and difficulty reordering staples quickly.
- Propose a fix: smarter substitution logic that learns individual preferences (e.g. always prefer a specific brand) instead of generic substitution rules.
- Address delivery predictability: more accurate, dynamically updated delivery time windows based on real-time shopper/store load.
- Add a fast-reorder feature for staple items based on purchase history, reducing repeat-order friction.
- Define success: order accuracy satisfaction score and repeat purchase rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets substitution quality, a well-known, concrete pain point in grocery delivery, rather than generic 'improve the app' ideas.
- Proposes personalized substitution logic learned from past behavior, a specific, buildable mechanism.
- Addresses delivery-window reliability with real-time dynamic updates instead of static estimates.
- Chooses order accuracy satisfaction as a meaningful metric tied directly to the identified pain point.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic new features (loyalty program, more coupons) without addressing the known substitution/accuracy pain point.
- Ignoring that delivery-window reliability is often the biggest driver of dissatisfaction in this category.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a shopper substituting an item the customer explicitly doesn't want?
- How would you balance shopper speed against order accuracy?
More product design questions
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- How would you improve Uber?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- Create a smartphone for a 6-year-old.Adobe · Product design · Medium
- What is your favorite product? Why?PayPal · 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