Product design question
What are some reasons why WeWork failed?
- Airbnb
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Tests grounded business and product judgment on a real, well-documented company failure, requiring specific, known reasons rather than vague speculation.
How to approach it
- State the well-known core issue: WeWork was valued and run as a high-growth tech company while its underlying business was a capital-intensive real estate leasing model with thin margins.
- Name the mismatched unit economics: WeWork signed long-term leases but offered short-term, flexible memberships to tenants, creating a structural risk mismatch, especially exposed during downturns.
- Note the governance and leadership issues that became public around its IPO attempt, including related-party transactions and concerns about founder control, which damaged investor trust.
- Note the unsustainable growth-at-all-costs expansion into too many locations too quickly, without proving profitability in existing ones first.
- Draw the reusable product and business lesson: rapid growth funded by cheap capital can mask a structurally unprofitable unit economics model until funding tightens.
- Avoid inventing specific financial figures not part of common public knowledge.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the real, well-documented core issue, the lease-versus-membership term mismatch, rather than vague overexpansion talk.
- References the known governance concerns around the IPO attempt as a concrete, factual data point.
- Extracts a reusable lesson about growth funded by cheap capital masking weak unit economics, applicable beyond this one case.
- Sticks to publicly known facts rather than fabricating specific numbers.
Common mistakes
- Giving a vague answer like it grew too fast without naming the actual structural business model mismatch.
- Inventing specific financial figures not part of common knowledge.
- Not connecting the failure to a broader, reusable strategic lesson.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you have changed about WeWork's lease strategy?
- How would you evaluate a similar high-growth company today?
- What's a company you think has a similar risk today?
More product design questions
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- Give an example of a badly designed product.Adobe · Product design · Easy
- Imagine you’re a Product Manager at Airbnb. You have been assigned the task of adding a new feature that could be useful to the Airbnb user base. It must include an integration with an external third-party/non-Airbnb API.Airbnb · Product design · Medium
- Design a way for people to find apartments.Google · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve Airbnb in 6 months?Airbnb · Product design · Hard
More questions from Airbnb
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