Product design question
What privacy feature would you add to Twitter?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product design on a sensitive area, privacy, requiring the candidate to balance user control against Twitter's public by default nature.
How to approach it
- Confirm scope: profile visibility, DM privacy, or control over who can reply to a tweet.
- Segment users: public figures wanting to limit harassment versus private users wanting to limit visibility.
- Identify the pain point: users cannot currently control who replies to their tweets, leading to harassment.
- Prioritize reply control since it directly reduces a well known, high visibility harm on the platform.
- Propose a feature: let posters choose who can reply, such as followers only or mentioned users only.
- Define success with a drop in reported harassment and stable or improved tweet engagement.
What a strong answer includes
- Names an actual real feature area, reply control, close to Twitter's real shipped Conversation Settings.
- Ties the feature to a known platform problem, harassment in replies, rather than generic privacy.
- Sets a guardrail metric, engagement should not collapse, alongside the harm reduction metric.
- States an illustrative target, such as a 10 percent drop in reported abusive replies.
Common mistakes
- Proposes a privacy feature disconnected from Twitter's actual public conversation model.
- Ignores the tradeoff between limiting replies and reducing the platform's open conversation value.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent this from becoming an echo chamber tool?
- How would you measure success beyond just fewer reports?
- Would you make this the default or opt in, and why?
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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