Product design question

How would you improve throughput of an airport by 100%?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Tests ambitious operational product thinking: identifying the true bottleneck in a complex system to hit an aggressive throughput target.

Break airport throughput into stages: check in, security screening, boarding, and gate turnaround time between flights.
Identify the likely biggest bottleneck, typically security screening, since it is the most time and resource constrained single chokepoint.
Propose a targeted intervention, such as expanding biometric pre cleared lanes and parallelizing screening lanes rather than uniformly speeding up every stage.
Address the aggressive scale of the goal, noting that doubling throughput likely requires structural changes, not just incremental tweaks.
Define success: passengers processed per hour at the bottleneck stage, tracked against the doubling target.
State the assumption about which stage you identified as the primary constraint, since the interviewer may push back.

Identifies the true bottleneck first, likely security screening capacity, rather than uniformly proposing small improvements across every stage.
Proposes a structural change matched to the aggressive target, significantly expanding parallel biometric pre cleared lanes, since incremental tweaks cannot realistically double throughput.
Acknowledges the constraint doubling implies, noting it may require physical infrastructure expansion, not just process optimization alone.
Sets a measurable goal, for example a stated passengers processed per hour at security, tracked explicitly against the 100 percent increase target.

Proposing small, incremental fixes across every stage instead of identifying and solving the true bottleneck for an ambitious 100 percent target.
Ignoring that a target this aggressive likely requires structural or infrastructure change, not just software or process tweaks.

What structural constraint would stop you from doubling throughput no matter what you optimize?
How would you sequence which stage to fix first if you could only tackle one?