Product design question
How would you improve Netflix Recommendation?
- Netflix
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement thinking for a core, high-stakes algorithmic feature: identifying a specific weakness in recommendation quality and proposing a measurable fix.
How to approach it
- Identify a specific weakness: recommendations can feel repetitive or overly narrow once a user's taste profile is established, reducing discovery of new content types.
- Identify the user impact: users may churn from boredom if the catalog feels smaller than it is, since recommendations dominate content discovery on the platform.
- Prioritize balancing relevance with discovery: improve the recommendation system to intentionally surface a controlled amount of adjacent or novel content, not just more-of-the-same.
- Propose the mechanism: an explicit 'exploration' component in the ranking algorithm that occasionally surfaces content slightly outside the user's established pattern, tracked for engagement.
- Define an MVP: A/B test an exploration-weighted version of the algorithm against the current one for a subset of users.
- Define success: increase in content diversity watched per user without a decrease in overall watch time or satisfaction (measured via thumbs up and down or completion rate).
What a strong answer includes
- Names a specific, well-known weakness, recommendation narrowness and repetitiveness, rather than a vague 'make recommendations better' statement.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, an exploration component in the ranking algorithm, which is a real, established technique in recommendation system design.
- Balances the fix against a guardrail, ensuring watch time and satisfaction do not drop as diversity increases, rather than optimizing diversity alone.
- Proposes a proper A/B test to validate the change before a full rollout, rather than assuming the fix works.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to 'use more data' or 'better AI' with no specific, concrete mechanism.
- Increasing content diversity without a guardrail to ensure overall satisfaction and watch time do not suffer.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you tune how much exploration content to show without frustrating users who want familiar content?
- How would you measure whether increased diversity actually reduces long-term churn?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Netflix?Spotify · Product design · Easy
- Design Netflix for Senior Citizens (Goal: Increase engagement time).Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- Netflix rating page is annoying for the users. What will you do to fix this?Netflix · Product design · Easy
- How would you go about designing a skip feature for a video streaming service?YouTube · Product design · Medium
- You have decided to build the feature 'Sharing recommendations' for Netflix. What happens next?LinkedIn · Product design · Medium
- How would you use generative AI to create dynamic, personalized trailers for each user to increase engagement at Netflix?Netflix · Product design · Hard
More questions from Netflix
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