Product design question
How would you improve Instagram?
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Product sense for a visual social app, balancing creator tools against casual viewer experience.
How to approach it
- Pick a segment, for example casual scrollers browsing Explore versus close friends checking Stories daily.
- Identify a pain point: Explore recommendations often feel repetitive or disconnected from genuine current interests.
- Prioritize Explore relevance over new content formats, since discovery quality drives daily return visits.
- Propose refreshing Explore ranking to weight recent interaction signals more heavily and reduce repeated similar content.
- Add a lightweight feedback control, a 'show me less like this' option, to give users direct input into ranking.
- Define success as increased Explore session time and reduced 'not interested' actions per session.
What a strong answer includes
- Focuses on one specific surface, Explore, and its known weakness, staleness, instead of vague 'improve the feed' talk.
- Proposes a concrete user control, negative feedback signals, which directly improves both UX and the ranking model.
- Gives an illustrative number, e.g. assumes current repeat content rate in Explore is 25 percent and targets under 10 percent.
- Connects the fix to a measurable outcome, session time, rather than stopping at the feature description.
Common mistakes
- Proposing unrelated new content formats instead of fixing a known discovery quality issue.
- Not giving users any way to correct or influence the recommendation system directly.
- No specific metric to prove the change actually improved relevance.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you balance relevance against content diversity?
- How would you use negative feedback signals in ranking?
- What would you measure to catch this making things worse?
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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