Interview Questions

Umang S. - "Just a bit of context on what could be a risk in Product or Software Development. We talk about the Scope, Quality, and Time Triangle. IMHO the only variables that can matter and can pose risk are these. Try to form an answer where you used the Effort, Value, Risk framework to quantify the risk. The answer can be similar to short term sacrifices for long term gains, as you do take in mind the risk the short term sacrifices pose. Situation - I was leading the team to complete an overhaul of the"See full answer

R A. - "Company Mission: Make video communication frictionless Product: Zoom is a telecommunications tool used by companies and individuals to interact with one another. It has a freemium business model i.e. it provides some basic features to its users for free and premium features for a subscription. Features: Video and audio interactions. Built-in collaboration features. End-to-end encryption for all meetings. Recording and transcripts. Streamlined calendaring. User Base: "See full answer

Ekta M. - "I would start with some clarifying questions like: Is there a deadline when all these needs to be updated by? Do we have upgrade scripts ready? When do we have change freeze? Once I have these few clarifying answers I would start planning: I would meet with all the teams involved in the upgrades Document any resources downtime during the upgrade create a risk registry along with mitigation plan Roll back plan create a phased rollout plan based on deadline Post upgrade get a"See full answer

Aabid S. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer

Bipin R. - "As you know, this is the most important question for any interview. Here is a structure I like to follow, Start with 'I'm currently a SDE/PM/TPM etc with XYZ company.... ' Mention how you got into PM/TPM/SDE field (explaining your journey) Mention 1 or 2 accomplishments Mention what you do outside work (blogging, volunteer etc) Share why are you looking for a new role Ask the interviewer if they have any questions or will like to dive deep into any of your experience"See full answer

Shashank S. - "Prioritizing competing features involves evaluating and comparing different features to determine which ones to implement first, based on their relative importance, value, and impact on the product and users. Here are some steps to help prioritize competing features: Define the goals and objectives: Identify the product's overall goals, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you understand what features are most important to achieve these goals. **Gather"See full answer

Jaehyuk C. - "Q: What ad system do we have (to clarify the limitation of the ads systems and its scope)? -> need context of the advertisement. What signals of ads do we have? pictures, texts, comments, video, etc. What is daily active users on the system? (scalability) Do we need taking actions after detecting it? (further process is needed?) what device do we have ad system? PC, mobile, etc. FR: detect the weapon signals (classification) alert after weapon is detected identify the us"See full answer

Vijay M. - "Very well done."See full answer

Anonymous Mongoose - "The below system design addresses the requirements for a scalable distributed onboarding service, focusing on robust data validation, asynchronous processing, real-time aggregation, and efficient querying of metadata. Core Principles: Asynchronous Processing: Decouple components to ensure high throughput and responsiveness. Scalability & Elasticity: Utilize technologies that can scale horizontally to handle varying loads. Data Durability & Integrity: Ensure no data l"See full answer

Praveen - "Narrow down scope with clarifying questions: Confirm that Reactions are the like, love, sad and other icons that facebook users can respond with on your post. Understand the metric: is "down" ... absolute number or is it a ratio of reactions per post? Understand the boundary conditions: Is it specific to a certain region, certain segment of users (only from new users versus active users), happening on personal posts or group posts, happening on app versus desktop/mobile etc. Under"See full answer

Adam L. - "Discussed: Requirements of the system: latency language modality (assume keyboard typing) availability of data (assume cold start) success metric (accuracy of next word predicted?, or minimize false positives? -> accuracy to start) Data collection and processing: design ethical user experiments to collect typed out data design a simple tokenization strategy (word level encoding, character level encoding, byte-pair encodings, and discuss tradeoffs) collect data, and split"See full answer

Yao X. - "In general, I don't think Google should go into ridesharing market at this point. (06/2020) I have 3 reasons why Google should not get into ridesharing business at this point and a exception. Reason 1: Current market With major players like Uber and Lyft occupying around 90% of the market, current ridesharing business market is already crowded. These companies have been around for 6-7 years and users already formed the user habit of using either Uber or Lyft when they need a car to go some"See full answer

KAI - "Answer: select fromcaller, count(DISTINCT tocallee) as num_calls from calls group by fromcaller having count(DISTINCT tocallee) >= 3 Setup: CREATE TABLE calls ( from_caller VARCHAR(20), to_callee VARCHAR(20) ); INSERT INTO calls (fromcaller, tocallee) VALUES ('Alice', 'Bob'), ('Charlie', 'Dave'), ('Alice', 'Frank'), ('Charlie', 'Heidi'), ('Charlie', 'Judy'); "See full answer

Elly P. - "Answer generated using AI plugin: https://github.com/buildforward/product-sense-interview-answer Section 1 — Clarify (~2 min) Before I dive in, I'd like to ask a couple of clarifying questions to make sure I'm solving the right problem. What do we mean by "engaging"? Hashtags can drive discovery, community, creation, or interaction. I'll assume we're focused on making hashtags more engaging for content consumers — increasing the time people spend exploring and interacting with"See full answer

Ankush G. - "=>user => window {addfile(void * file, userID, chatID) => add to fileList=> Display(file pointer)} => file=> pointer to DB, thumbnail => file will stores in database, pointer to the file+ thumbnail to be visible to chat => file is associated with chat => chat : users list, notepad: post { , user posted} class file{ void * buffer = nullptr; string fileName = nullptr; public: file( void content, string filename ):fileName ("See full answer

Justin G. - "Observation This is an interesting question. The solution has two heads, meaning that the user must feel less guilty AND the solution must also increase revenue towards the platform. Structure The way I would approach this involves splitting the question into sequential steps. Why are users feeling guilty about using Instagram? What are some ways to make them feel less guilty? How can we monetize this? Clarification How do we define guilt? Is there a relevant subsector of"See full answer

Pratik M. - "Few clarifying questions here Is the competitor a service and does it have other offerings as well? Is it charging $5 for a service or only email? Is it for a specific platform here? Or does it include all platforms? Does the competitor have a huge market share/or is it a small company? Let's assume it's only for email's The structure I would want to layout for knowing what to do next for Gmail would be the following - Mission, Goals, Google's revenue model, Customer Profiles using Gm"See full answer

Amit S. - "YT's mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. So when a user is sharing their voice with us in the form of a feedback, I would receive it with open mind. I would first determine what the review is about: 1. app/website's performance 2. quality of content they experienced 3. complain about YT being addictive and causing them to lose time 4. difficulty in using the app/website (search, navigation, recent changes negatively affected their experience) 5. complain about other YTbe"See full answer

WaterBuffalo - "One of the most challenging situations was joining a new startup to realize that they did not figure out their core product and that customers were dissatisfied and leaving in droves. I worked together with the leaders to understand the core issue and the reasons that the customers were leaving. Then together with the team, we set out to map out those core issues and the gaps that we had in our product. We then worked towards designing a new solution to address those gaps and build an MVP. W"See full answer

Anonymous Hummingbird - "Clarifying questions: · Is there a specific scenario we are building before? Example: urgent need for a specific type of blood vs building up blood banks proactively. You decide · This would be for mobile/web and integrate into the existing facebook product? Yes Ok before we get started I wanted to discuss the facebook mission: to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. I can see how blood donation fits directly into this, enabling blood donation helps"See full answer