Interview Questions

R S. - "My main task was to improve our recommendation system. I worked closely with the business and data teams to understand how recommendations were made in the past. After discussions, I found out that the system had fixed recommendations and didn't consider customer preferences. Our goal was to identify potential customers better, boost conversion rates with personalized recommendations, and increase cross-selling of products. After analyzing a lot of data, we focused on customers with accounts an"See full answer

BriskD - "I watched a couple of videos like this, one of them by Exponent staff (I think). It was disappointing that the architecture diagram and the walkthrough was a general layered architecture that you can apply to any backend system. I was wondering if there are videos that can be considered a reference material to watch, learn and improve on the tech (sys design) skills, and not so much about the soft skills."See full answer

Vivek S. - "Candidate [Clarifying Question 1] - Does success metric needs to be discussed across any particular stage of user life cycle - Growth , Engagement or Monetisation ? Interviewer - Let's focus on overall health metrics of the product. Candidate[Clarifying Question 2] : Does the metrics needs to be presented as an update to CXO in quarterly meetings or monthly meetings or it needs to be presented internally to product / marketing team for detailed analysis ? Interviewer - Let's sa"See full answer

Sam - "Disagreement --> persistent ---> more data insights ---> positive relationship ---> mentor/trust"See full answer

Jay C. - "How would you monetize messenger? Clarifying Questions Is this messenger app or web? INTERVIEWER: Assume both are a possibility, but feel free to pick one Is there a larger facebook goal or metric we are optimizing for? INTERVIEWER: Monetization speaks to revenue so assume goal is to increase revenue for Facebook as a whole Does this include messenger Rooms or should we stick to the traditional FB messenger? INTERVIEWER: _Messenger rooms is a great call out, but let's stick"See full answer

Sh R. - "i responded using a multi sourced BFS and in place marking, then i checked the final grid to see if any free spots were left unmarked."See full answer

Ankit M. - "Me: I would first like to ask a few clarifying questions : Is this tipping issue confined to specific regions? Is this a new problem, or has it always been present? Does this issue affect all types of rides offered by Lyft? Is there a correlation between driver ratings and the likelihood of being tipped? Interviewer: The problem is widespread across all regions where Lyft operates. It's not new but has been consistent over time. The lower tipping rate is uniform across all ride types, i"See full answer

Scott S. - " To clarify on what we are trying to solve for and get the definition of a distributed scheduler straight . So A Distributed Scheduler refers to a system that can handle job scheduling and execution in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner by distributing the workload across multiple servers or nodes. we will make some assumptions with the design , as follows: we will assume 10,000 QPS for job submissions and should be able query for jobs status . Job execution should have minimal latency"See full answer

P K. - "Assuming this is meant to be a standalone product. Its a standalone app. Goal: Simplify the shopping experience in store for a user. Success would be defined in terms of app usage as a proxy for user satisfaction. I want to think about the a given user segment, their pain points, ways to improve their pain and a way to evaluate those solutions. Broadly user personas associated with grocery shopping are - stores and customers. For the purpose of this interview I want to focus on customer se"See full answer

Karthik T. - "Our application has millions of users and significant load on file upload feature. Situation : In our legacy application we had a particular page which was accepting file uploads and it had the legacy way of selecting file uploads and page would redirect you to the next page or show an error message on failure. Task : I had regular calls with the customer who had reported issue multiple times on this application area. In my calls my I also understood that client was expecting some inno"See full answer

Ankit M. - "Interviewer: Design a Meta Product for space travel. Me: I would first likely ask a few clarifying questions. Can we discuss more about what do we mean by a product for space travel? Is it like a physical product or a software product? Any existing suite of products that we want to integrate this into? Interviewer: It can be a digital platform – a combination of software and services, integrated in a single ecosystem. It's not a physical product like a spacecraft, but rather a pla"See full answer

Kay T. - "How I would approach this question: Understand the goal of the customer service platform: What is the main business goal of this company and how is the customer service platform serving the company goals? For this question, I'm assuming the user journey is that customers come to the customer service platform when they run into issues. Thus, ultimately the customer service platform is feeding into the top line business metric of customer retention. Do customers keep"See full answer

Karthik M. - "1. Step 1: clarify Let's establish the mission of Google and Youtube. Google's is to provide and make information more accessible. Youtube's might be to help people get their content, their word and themselves out into the world. I mean so many of Youtube's ads have been about how the diversity of individuals and their content, so that makes sense. Let's establish what is Youtube. Youtube has 3 primary stakeholders - creators, viewers and brands/corporations and within them"See full answer

Ram - "Clarification Are we focusing on building the product on a specific Meta platform (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), or is this a standalone effort? Is the product digital or physical? Are we targeting internal (employees) or external (customers) users? Are there any specific constraints like funding, resourcing, or geography? 1. Narrowing Down the Problem Awareness and Education: Create tools to increase understanding of climate change and its effects. -"See full answer

Sumeet R. - "Clarifying Questions: Assume US Audience or Worldwide? US Only Assume short form content or long form content ? Assume all Premium or Ads Support ? All Solution: US Population 300M Will remove 70 ages as not relevant audience or not have access to YouTube = 60m Leaving 240M. Adoption of YouTube with remaining Population = 60% (including overlap and exclusion with other services e.g. Netflix) Total Audience that watches YouTube daily = 144m (about half of US Populat"See full answer

Anonymous Partridge - "We will have to use a second more powerful LLM Model to validate the answers. LLM as a judge"See full answer

devopsjesus - "This was a 60 minute assessment. The clock is ticking and you're being observed by a senior+ level engineer. Be ready to perform for an audience. The implementation for the system gets broken up into three parts: Implement creating accounts and depositing money into an account by ID Implement transferring money with validation to ensure the accounts for the transfer both exist and that the account money is being removed from has enough money in it to perform the transfer Implement find"See full answer

Zafeer R. - "I was owning a very ambitious company-wide project of standardizing and modernizing the UI and UX of the platform. It was in development for a few years and eventually turned out to be a failure for the product. I term this as my biggest failure as a product manager. So I worked for a company which had a suite of products. Each product had a different UX and UI. This resulted in nonuniformity across the suite and caused usability issues for our suite users. The idea was to have a standard exper"See full answer

Vikas T. - "This is coming from an Amazon manager who are taught to PIP people out. The first part he said is completely opposite with Amazon. They just pull people randomly into the room and put them either on dev list or PIP. This is unfortunately true for all of Amazon."See full answer