Product design question
The CEO of a your company asks you to design a new ATM for their Airport segment. What do you do?
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Product design for a specific location-constrained use case, requiring identification of what's different about airport travelers.
How to approach it
- Clarify the company's core business to scope realistic constraints, and confirm with the interviewer if ambiguous.
- Segment users: international travelers needing currency exchange, domestic travelers needing quick cash, and travelers in a hurry between flights.
- Identify the pain point: long transaction times and confusing multi-currency options under time pressure before a flight.
- Prioritize speed and multi-currency clarity for international travelers, the segment airport ATMs uniquely serve versus a neighborhood ATM.
- Design the solution: a streamlined flow defaulting to the traveler's likely destination currency, detected via card issuer country, targeting under 60 seconds.
- Define success: average transaction time and reduction in abandoned transactions during peak departure windows.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies what's actually different about the airport context, time pressure and multi-currency needs, instead of designing a generic ATM.
- Proposes a concrete personalization mechanism, currency defaulting by card issuer, specific to this segment.
- Uses transaction time and abandonment, metrics tied directly to the airport time-pressure context.
- Considers placement and peak-time load as part of the design.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic ATM with no airport-specific insight.
- Ignoring the international traveler and multi-currency angle.
- Not accounting for peak departure-time congestion.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle security given ATMs in public airport spaces are theft targets?
- How would you decide how many ATMs to place and where in the terminal?
- How would you measure success beyond transaction speed?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
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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