Product design question

It is post COVID and employees need to come back to the office. How would you design a system for employees to book desks?

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

Whether you can design an internal tool balancing employee flexibility against a real operational constraint, capacity.

Clarify scope: booking individual desks in a hybrid office, versus meeting rooms or full-floor capacity, and set that boundary.
Identify user segments: employees wanting flexibility and proximity to teammates, and facilities teams needing to manage capacity and cleaning.
Surface the key tension: employees want to sit near their team, but capacity limits mean not everyone gets first choice every day.
Prioritize team-proximity-aware booking, since sitting near teammates matters more to adoption than any other single factor.
Propose a concrete flow: book a desk near your team for a chosen day, with a waitlist and auto-suggestion of nearby open desks.
Define success metrics: booking-to-attendance rate and desk utilization, with a guardrail on employees unable to sit near their team.

Identifies the real tension, flexibility versus limited capacity, instead of just describing a generic booking calendar.
Prioritizes team proximity as the key adoption driver, based on why employees actually come to the office.
Gives an illustrative number, assuming desk utilization needs to stay near 70 to 80 percent to avoid overcrowding on peak days.
Adds a guardrail on employees failing to sit near their team, since that would undermine the whole point of coming in.

Designing a generic room-booking clone without addressing why proximity to teammates matters most.
Ignoring the no-show problem, where booked desks go unused and reduce effective capacity.

How would you handle chronic no-shows on booked desks?
What would you do if two teams wanted the same limited desk zone on the same day?