Product design question

How would you improve Venmo?

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 product sense for a payments app with a social layer, balancing the social feed feature against core payment utility and privacy concerns.

Clarify scope: default to the core send and request money and social feed experience for existing users.
Segment users: those who primarily split bills with friends, and those using Venmo more transactionally, like paying a landlord.
Pick one pain point: the public-by-default social feed has drawn real privacy criticism, exposing spending patterns and relationships unintentionally.
Propose extending stricter private-by-default settings plus clearer, in-flow privacy controls at the moment of payment, not buried in settings.
Address the trade-off: the feed is part of Venmo's social, viral growth loop, so any privacy tightening should preserve an opt-in social sharing option.
Define success: reduction in reported privacy complaints, and retention impact among privacy-conscious users after the change.

Identifies a real, well-known Venmo pain point, the public feed's privacy exposure, rather than a generic feature request.
Balances the fix against Venmo's actual growth mechanism, the social feed, instead of proposing to remove it outright.
Proposes moving privacy controls to the point of action, a concrete UX fix, not just adding more settings.
Defines success with both a trust metric and a retention metric, showing awareness of the business trade-off.

Proposing to remove the social feed entirely, ignoring that it's part of Venmo's core growth loop.
Suggesting generic feature additions unrelated to Venmo's most well-documented real user complaint.

How would you measure whether privacy changes hurt viral growth?
How would you handle users who want their transactions public for social reasons?