Product design question
How would you improve the airport experience?
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 design across a multi-stage journey, checking you can pick a specific high-friction moment rather than trying to fix the whole airport experience.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope, whether this is about the physical airport journey broadly or a specific product's role, like a travel or maps app, within it.
- Break the journey into stages: pre-arrival, security, gate wait, and post-flight, since pain points differ sharply by stage.
- Identify the sharpest pain point, commonly security wait time uncertainty or navigating an unfamiliar terminal under time pressure.
- Propose the design: real-time, crowd-sourced or sensor-based security wait time estimates surfaced proactively based on the traveler's flight time.
- Prioritize this single high-anxiety moment over trying to redesign the entire journey, since travelers value certainty most when time pressure is highest.
- Define success as reduced traveler-reported anxiety or missed-flight incidents, and confirm the product surface, app versus physical signage, is in scope.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks one specific high-anxiety stage, security wait uncertainty, rather than vaguely improving 'the whole airport experience'.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, real-time wait estimates tied to the traveler's own flight time and gate location, personalizing the anxiety-reduction.
- Explains why uncertainty, not just wait length, is the real pain point, since travelers can plan around a known wait but not an unknown one.
- Sets a measurable goal, reduction in missed-flight-related support cases or anxiety-linked app engagement, tied to the specific fix.
Common mistakes
- Trying to redesign the entire airport journey without picking a specific high-leverage moment.
- Not distinguishing wait time length from wait time uncertainty as the actual driver of anxiety.
- Proposing a fix with no way to measure whether traveler experience actually improved.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you source reliable real-time security wait data?
- What would you prioritize next after solving the security wait uncertainty?
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
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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