Product design question
Improve the current iteration of Snapchat to compete with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether the candidate can identify a defensible competitive angle rather than proposing feature parity with better-resourced rivals.
How to approach it
- Assess the competitive landscape: Instagram has closed much of the feature gap (Stories, Reels), and TikTok dominates algorithmic discovery, so direct feature-matching is a losing strategy.
- Identify Snapchat's real remaining strength: close-friend, ephemeral, camera-first communication among younger users, distinct from public content discovery.
- Prioritize doubling down on that strength rather than chasing Reels-style public content further, since that plays to competitors' scale advantages.
- Propose a focused improvement, such as deeper AR-based communication tools (camera effects, Bitmoji-driven interaction) that make close-friend messaging more expressive and hard to replicate.
- Define success as time spent in close-friend chat and Stories specifically, and retention among the core teen and young-adult segment, not overall MAU against TikTok.
What a strong answer includes
- Rejects head-on feature competition with Instagram and TikTok as a losing strategy, given their scale and resource advantage.
- Names Snapchat's real differentiator, close-friend ephemeral communication, as the strategic anchor, not public content discovery.
- Defines success narrowly around the core segment's retention rather than chasing overall MAU parity with much larger competitors.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to out-build Instagram's Reels or TikTok's algorithm directly, playing to their strengths.
- Measuring success by total user count instead of health of the core close-friend use case.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you defend against continued feature copying by Instagram?
- What would make you conclude Snapchat should abandon public content entirely?
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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