Product design question
How would you improve Twitter?
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 sense for a public conversation platform, finding a real pain point beyond generic feature requests.
How to approach it
- Pick a segment, for example casual readers who follow topics versus active posters who reply and build threads.
- Identify a pain point for readers: low quality replies and spam crowd out substantive conversation on popular tweets.
- Prioritize reply quality over new posting features, since a noisy reply section is the most cited complaint about the platform.
- Propose surfacing 'best replies' ranked by a mix of author engagement and community signals, shown before chronological replies.
- Consider abuse: pair this with better detection of coordinated low quality replies to protect the ranking's integrity.
- Define success as time spent reading replies and reduction in users reporting reply spam.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets a specific, widely cited pain point, low quality reply threads, instead of a scattershot feature list.
- Explains the ranking mechanism concretely, engagement plus community signals, rather than saying 'better algorithm'.
- Gives an illustrative number, e.g. assumes 30 percent of top tweet replies are currently low value or spam.
- Considers the abuse vector, since any ranking change creates new incentives for spam actors to game it.
Common mistakes
- Proposing unrelated new features like editing tweets instead of a focused, high impact improvement.
- Ignoring how bad actors would try to game a new ranking system.
- No success metric tied to the actual pain point being solved.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent this ranking from being gamed?
- How would you measure reply quality objectively?
- What would you build first if you could ship only one change?
More product design questions
- How can Google help improve the grocery shopping experience of users?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve Uber?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- What is your favorite product? Why?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve Venmo?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve the Starbucks app?PayPal · Product design · Easy
- How would you design a colony on mars.PayPal · Product design · Hard
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