Product design question
How would you improve Instacart’s homescreen in the app?
- Instacart
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement skill on a familiar grocery delivery app: spotting a real friction point and proposing a targeted fix.
How to approach it
- Confirm the goal: faster reorder, better discovery, or higher basket size on the home screen.
- Segment users: weekly staple shoppers and occasional special occasion shoppers behave very differently.
- Identify the pain point: staple shoppers repeat the same cart every week but the home screen treats them like new visitors.
- Prioritize a reorder focused module since it serves the largest, most valuable repeat segment.
- Propose surfacing a one tap reorder of the last cart at the top of the home screen.
- Define success as reorder click through rate and time to add first item to cart.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets the highest value segment, repeat staple shoppers, with a specific home screen change.
- Proposes a concrete module, one tap reorder of last cart, not a vague redesign.
- Sets a clear metric, time to first add to cart, tied directly to the change.
- Notes an illustrative baseline, assuming today's average time to first add is over two minutes.
Common mistakes
- Redesigns the whole home screen instead of one focused improvement.
- Ignores that repeat shoppers and new shoppers need different home screens.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you personalize this without making the screen feel cluttered?
- How would you measure whether this cannibalizes browsing of new products?
- How would this change for a shopper ordering for the first time?
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More questions from Instacart
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