Product design question
Imagine you were asked to design a "trending photos" feature. How would you go about it?
- Meta
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design instincts for a discovery feature on a photo platform, including how to define trending fairly and safely.
How to approach it
- Clarify the surface: is this Facebook, Instagram, or both, and does trending mean global or within a user's network.
- Identify the target users: people who browse for entertainment and creators who want visibility for timely content.
- Name the pain point: today relevant, high quality photos get buried under an unfiltered chronological or engagement-only feed.
- Define trending using velocity of likes, comments, and shares over a short window, not raw totals, to catch fast risers.
- Design the surface as a dedicated tab or row, ranked and diversified across topics so one viral post does not dominate.
- Pick a success metric such as click-through rate into the trending row and downstream session time.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses a velocity based score, for example engagement per hour relative to the poster's normal baseline, so a small creator can trend too.
- Adds guardrails against misinformation and graphic content since a trending shelf amplifies reach quickly.
- Diversifies results across topic clusters so the row is not five photos of the same event.
Common mistakes
- Defining trending purely by raw like count, which favors accounts that already have large followings.
- Skipping moderation and virality safeguards for a feature explicitly built to amplify content.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent coordinated engagement from gaming the trending score?
- How would you personalize trending photos without making it just another algorithmic feed?
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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