Product design question
How would you improve the Quora website? What will be your strategy to engage more users?
- Quora
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Tests basic product sense for a mature Q&A platform, picking one specific engagement lever tied to content quality rather than generic growth tactics.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: assume improving the core reading and answering experience for existing casual users, not new-user acquisition marketing.
- Segment users: lurkers who mostly read, occasional answerers, and prolific topic experts, since each needs a different nudge to engage more.
- Pick one pain point: lurkers rarely convert to answering because there's no low-effort way to contribute short of writing a full answer.
- Propose a lightweight quick-take reply type, shorter than a full answer, that lowers the bar to contribute and can be upgraded to a full answer later.
- Address the trade-off: quick takes could dilute answer quality if not clearly distinguished from full answers in the UI, so keep them visually and structurally separate.
- Define success: lurker-to-contributor conversion rate, and whether quick takes correlate with later full-answer authorship.
What a strong answer includes
- Segments users by engagement level and targets the largest underengaged group, lurkers, rather than a generic increase-engagement answer.
- Proposes a specific, low-effort contribution mechanism addressing the real barrier to converting readers into contributors.
- Explicitly manages the quality-dilution risk with a UI design choice, showing awareness of Quora's core value proposition.
- Defines success with a conversion metric tied directly to the stated goal of engaging more users.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic engagement tactics like notifications or badges without addressing the real barrier to contribution.
- Ignoring the risk that a lower-effort contribution type could dilute the platform's answer quality.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent quick takes from becoming spam or low-effort noise?
- How would you measure whether this actually grows total useful content, not just activity?
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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