Product design question

You're the product manager at eBay. Design a new homepage.

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

Product design balancing personalization and discovery for a marketplace's dual auction-and-fixed-price nature.

Clarify: assume the goal is improving buyer engagement and conversion on first landing, a known challenge given a historically cluttered homepage.
Identify the user pain: a mix of auctions, deals, and used or unique items makes generic category browsing less effective than personalized discovery.
Prioritize personalized 'recently viewed' and 'based on your searches' modules over static category tiles, since the real strength is long-tail inventory best surfaced via personalization.
Highlight time-sensitive auction urgency, ending-soon items, prominently, a mechanic unique versus fixed-price competitors.
Simplify visual density, reducing clutter versus a historically busy homepage, prioritizing a few high-relevance modules over many low-relevance ones.
Define success as click-through rate from homepage modules to listings and homepage-attributed conversion rate.

Leverages the platform's actual differentiator, auctions, long-tail inventory, urgency, rather than designing a generic clone of a fixed-price competitor.
Names a specific known weakness, visual clutter, and proposes simplification as a concrete fix.
Prioritizes personalization over static browsing, matching the real strength in niche and used inventory discovery.

Designing a homepage indistinguishable from a fixed-price competitor, ignoring the unique auction and urgency mechanics.
Adding more modules or clutter instead of addressing the known simplicity problem.

How would you balance auction urgency against fixed-price simplicity on the same page?
How would you personalize for a brand-new user with no history?