Interview Questions

Anonymous Aardvark - "QUESTION: Imagine that you are a PM that owns the post booking experience at Airbnb.How would you solve for the worst post-booking experience? Follow-up questions: Specific business goal in mind? (no) What is my scope? Do I own all post booking across product category? Or is there a specific product that I am focussing on (events, homes, specific home duration)? (you chose) Am I focussing on the user - renter or event goer? Or the creator - host or event creator? (your choice) Do yo"See full answer

Chitapuram N. - "Since there is a need for the data to be accurate and consistent without any latency to allocate a spot, can't the data be synchronously synced to replicas after every write as the number of writes are not many per min, instead of read lock phenomena Let me know if i am on a wrong thought here."See full answer

Manu G. - "Design an alarm clock for blind people Clarifying question: Does it have to be a physical product or software? Your call Do I need to think about the long-term implications of the product from a strategy perspective or a single product? single product What are the metrics this company will focus on? Engagement What industry are we in? (start-up, google/Amazon, etc) - Startup What do we mean by blind? - ppl who cannot see anything, or people who still have sense of"See full answer

Vihari K. - "Situation: While working at CVS Health, our inventory management system for OTCHS products was facing challenges. We had increasing stock outs, and our existing data was insufficient to fully understand and address the issue since it has been only a year this product line was initiated. Action: Although we do have a forecasting model to predict demand and other algorithms to trigger out of stock flags to warehouses to fill them, lack of data points on seasonality, supplier delays, compliance"See full answer

Michelle D. - "I'd tell the interviewer that I'd start off with clarifying the question to make sure I understand it correctly (see 1 below). Then, I'd tell the interviewer my approach to make sure they know what to expect as I talk through. Approach would start with discussing the mission and connecting a north star metric (NSM) to the mission, then discuss key product metrics that are inputs towards NSM. If there's time at the end and if the interviewer wants to go down this path, we should also talk about t"See full answer

Jagat mohan B. - "Found bug will not impact on the new requirements, if the engineering team aware of the source of the bug and the severity, than it can easily be handled and regression test to perform for a quality check. The new requirement should be equally prioritize for groom and start creating task and team to work on it. Finally based on the severity of the bug you can shuffle the resources between these items."See full answer

VContaineers - " Compare alternate houses i.e for each house starting from the third, calculate the maximum money that can be stolen up to that house by choosing between: Skipping the current house and taking the maximum money stolen up to the previous house. Robbing the current house and adding its value to the maximum money stolen up to the house two steps back. package main import ( "fmt" ) // rob function calculates the maximum money a robber can steal func maxRob(nums []int) int { ln"See full answer

Ravindra R. - "First, I want to understand why Airbnb is considering expanding into the restaurant space. Is the goal more user engagement, or unlock new monetization paths, or make the travel journey more memorable by connecting people with food? Next, I want to define what success would look like for this expansion. That could mean high guest engagement or a boost in revenue. Third, I will look at things like the volume of Airbnb travelers to the region, how big the dining market is, who the local competitor"See full answer

Sreeram reddy B. - "select employeename, employeeid, salary, department, DR from ( select employeename, employeeid, salary, dense_rank() over (partition by department order by salary desc) DR, department from employee ) where DR <=3 order by department, DR"See full answer

Anonymous Muskox - "YouTube Goal -> Give voice to everyone and show them the world, Video -> Shorts( Dominated by Shorts, Reels, Tiktok Mid(1-25 Min). -> Youtube Medium Long(60-90 Mins) -> [Opportunity] Long(150-180 Mins) -> OTT Platform, Movies Youtube can assist content creators on Youtube to make high-quality Film Like Videos without any Production Setup. Assisting Content Creators to create Movies with"See full answer

Ankit M. - "Clarifying questions: When we talk about a 'meditation app', are we mainly focusing on audio content? And are we thinking of this under a big brand or are we a fresh startup? Also, is our main target the US? And, are we designing mainly for individual use, or are we thinking about larger settings like schools? Interviewer: It's a startup. We're aiming for individual users, mainly in the US, and yes, an audio-based format. Summary till now: In today's digital age there's an increasi"See full answer

D P. - "Question for the community: have others experienced a situation where the interviewer really pushed for defining a success metric early on in the case before making too much progress on the case itself? If so, how did you handle? How I approached the case: I used the framework taught here on Exponent but have a question for the community. At the beginning of the interview, I shared my steps - company goals, customer, painpoints, solutions, prioritize and if we had time, I'll explore some succ"See full answer

Lati K. - "I generally struggle with stakeholders and partners who doesn't communicate enough. Now it could be either they don't invest sufficient time and energy in doing so or at times they lack the skill sets to do so. In both the cases, the entire responsibility fell on the other person to dig deep into why someone is doing the way they are doing, reading into patterns and behaviour of their personality and adapting to those communication styles"See full answer

Mrinalini R. - "A good answer is describing an experience where you either proposed something that was selected after discussion or an alternate approach was taken, or you disagreed with a decision and argued for something else, either successfully or not. A good answer would be you had cogent arguments, the decision went another way for some reason, and you then fully backed the decision (agree to disagree is another way of stating it). You did not take it personally and you fully committed to the deci"See full answer

Astro S. - "What are they looking for in the answer? "See full answer

Glados - "Prompt - annual cost of managing Google photos (note - I believe Google doesn't ask estimation question anymore, not sure who/here/how this was asked) We will go over what Google photos is, its users, how they use photos, what costs are incurred, estimation - base case then scale it out, gut check the answers, and arrive at an estimate Google photos is a photo and video storage service. Its users are Content creators/users Google (hosting) Other service providers that provide value-add"See full answer

Kai H. - "I have 2 product feedbacks. I think it has been mentioned by many users of the platform. Provide a text summary of the videos so that we do not have to watch through the whole interview practice Actually comment if the interview was good or not, currently we do not really know if the answer given is of high quality "See full answer

Raoul S. - "Total number of successful conversations (Weekly). Success measured by sharing AI output or success indicators (e.g. Like)"See full answer