Product design question
How would you improve medium?
- Capital One
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product improvement sense for a publishing platform balancing reader and writer needs, and both a free and paid business model.
How to approach it
- Segment users: readers browsing for quality content, and writers trying to build an audience and earn through the Partner Program.
- Identify the core pain point: content discovery feels inconsistent, readers hit a paywall on interesting articles with little signal on quality beforehand, and new writers struggle to get discovered.
- Prioritize discovery and paywall friction over new writer tools, since it affects the largest number of users daily.
- Design a fix: clearer free preview length and topic based curation that surfaces quality content from lesser known writers, not just established ones.
- Consider the business model trade off, since looser paywalls could reduce subscription conversion, so any change needs testing.
- Define success as read completion rate and subscription conversion rate, tracked together so one is not sacrificed for the other.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly weighs the paywall change against subscription revenue, showing awareness of the business model, not just user experience.
- Targets discovery for lesser known writers, a real structural issue on the platform, not a cosmetic UI tweak.
- Proposes measuring both engagement and revenue metrics together to avoid a one sided win.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to remove the paywall entirely without considering the subscription business model.
- Focusing only on writer tools while ignoring the reader side discovery problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test a change to preview length without hurting subscription revenue?
- How would you help new writers get discovered without hurting established ones?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
More questions from these companies
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