Product design question
You are PM at Amazon in charge of launching Amazon's Bikeshare program. How would you go about it?
- Amazon
- 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
Tests launch strategy for a new physical infrastructure product: sequencing city selection, operations, and demand generation.
How to approach it
- Define the target user: urban commuters and tourists needing short trip transportation as an alternative to cars or rideshare.
- Identify the launch decision points: which city to start in, station density needed for convenience, and pricing model.
- Propose a city selection criterion, such as dense urban areas with existing bike infrastructure and favorable local regulation.
- Address operations: bike maintenance, rebalancing stations so bikes are available where demand is, and theft or damage mitigation.
- Define success: rides per bike per day and station availability rate as core launch health metrics.
- Confirm with the interviewer whether this is dockless or station based, since operational needs differ significantly.
What a strong answer includes
- Chooses a specific launch city criterion, high density with existing bike lane infrastructure and supportive local government, rather than a broad national rollout.
- Addresses rebalancing explicitly, proposing a logistics operation to redistribute bikes to high demand areas, since idle or misallocated bikes kill the user experience.
- Proposes a pricing model grounded in comparable services, per minute pricing with a discounted pass for frequent commuters.
- Sets a measurable launch metric, for example a stated rides per bike per day target that signals healthy utilization before expanding further.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring the operational complexity of bike rebalancing and maintenance, which determines whether the service is usable day to day.
- Proposing a broad multi city launch instead of validating operations and demand in one well chosen city first.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide when the pilot city is ready to expand to a second city?
- How would you handle theft or vandalism affecting bike availability?
More product design questions
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- For a retail store, users are frequently complaining about long queues during check out. What strategy would you use to improve the experience in the short term and long term?Shopify · Product design · Medium
- Give an example of a badly designed product.Adobe · Product design · Easy
- Design a library for the future.Spotify · Product design · Hard
- Explain some new Alexa Skillsets you would roll out and why.Amazon · Product design · Medium
More questions from Amazon
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