Product design question
How would you improve Twitter news?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests prioritization of a concrete improvement for a news-in-social-feed experience, tied to a real, known challenge around trust and content quality.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: Twitter's news-related surfaces like Trends and news-context annotations, since this differs from the main algorithmic timeline.
- Identify the pain point: trending topics often lack context, making it hard to distinguish credible breaking news from rumor or coordinated misinformation early on.
- Propose a concrete fix: clearer, faster-applied context labels on trending news topics, showing multiple credible sources and viewpoints as the story develops, building on Twitter's existing Community Notes concept.
- Prioritize this over cosmetic changes since misinformation risk on breaking news is a well-documented, high-stakes problem for the platform.
- Weigh the trade-off: adding friction or labels to fast-moving news could slow the platform's core real-time speed advantage if not designed carefully.
- Define success as reduced spread of later-debunked claims and user-reported trust in trending news topics.
What a strong answer includes
- Builds on Twitter's actual existing feature, Community Notes, rather than proposing something disconnected from what the platform already has.
- Picks a specific, well-known risk, breaking news misinformation, rather than a generic improve the news answer.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume a meaningful share of viral breaking-news trends are later partially or fully corrected, showing the real scale of the problem.
- Names the trade-off directly: speed versus accuracy, which is the central tension for real-time news on this platform.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI polish disconnected from the platform's real news and misinformation challenges.
- Ignoring Twitter's existing Community Notes feature and proposing something redundant.
- Not addressing the speed-versus-accuracy trade-off central to real-time news.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you speed up context labeling without sacrificing accuracy?
- How do you handle a story that's still developing and genuinely uncertain?
- What metric would show this actually reduced misinformation spread?
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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