Product Manager System Design Interview Questions

Aekagra S. - "To improve, we first need to understand the problems or opportunities for improvement that are currently present. Assumption: Potential improvement in the recommendation algorithm to make recommendations more pointed Current recommendations are not very specific. Users end up getting frustrated and move away from YouTube Potential improvement in the recommendation algorithm to make sure the user is not just bombarded with one set of videos, but gets varied recommendations to c"See full answer

Tesfaye M. - "Designing a system to track review abuse on Amazon.com involves detecting fraudulent, manipulative, or biased reviews while ensuring genuine customer feedback isn't mistakenly flagged. Here's a high-level breakdown: 1. Goals Detect and prevent fake or abusive reviews. Maintain integrity and trust in the review system. Support scalability for millions of products and reviews. 2. Key Abuse Scenarios Fake positive reviews (e.g., sellers boosting their own products). Fake"See full answer

Ketshi B. - "Clarifying questions When we say signals do you mean just features that are fed into the ML model that decide how the content should be ranked? Is newsfeed the front page of fb app. Can you expand what you mean by relevance? User journey User enters blue app.. Newsfeed is the first thing they see. User either continues on newsfeed ie scrolls through it or moves to a separate part of fb As they are scrolling they may see contents from friends, creators and ads, or other pages that they have been"See full answer

Ajay P. - "Designing an evaluation framework for ads ranking is crucial for optimizing the effectiveness and relevance of ads displayed to users. Here's a comprehensive framework that you can use: Define Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):** \\Click-Through Rate (CTR):\\ The ratio of clicks to impressions, indicating the effectiveness of an ad in attracting user attention. \\Conversion Rate:\\ The ratio of conversions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases) to clicks, measuring how well"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

Bella R. - "Approach Clarify the question Define deaf --> unable to hear, but can communicate via sign language, lip read and use all other senses Define fire alarm --> for residential use, it notifies occupants of smoke and potential fires and alerts fire department to check in and/or come over Define constraints --> budgetary constraint, design should be user-friendly and convenient Define goals --> get folks out of harm's way quickly and notify fire department to c"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

anush - "@Jacob, your videos are really good and helpful. I want to know about the tool, you use for explaining the design in the videos."See full answer

A B. - "Great explanation on each of the components and their use. During the interview would a PM candidate be expected to go in-depth for capacity estimation (e.g. storage estimation, bandwidth estimation etc.?)"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

Harshit G. - "Great. I will start by understanding the goal of Google Photos and how it aligns with the goal and mission of Google. After defining goals, I will talk about the user actions which will contribute towards this goal. Based on these actions, we will define metrics. Check-in with the interviewer on the approach here. Assuming that this looks good for the interviewer to proceed. Google Photo - Helping users organise & manage their pictures. Completely in line with Google's mission. Thinking ab"See full answer

Eshan P. - "Background A. Objective Lyft has a presence in Toledo, Ohio. At our current revenue per ride of $6, we can match 60% consumers requesting a ride with a driver. Our goal is to maximize net revenues in the next 12 months by figuring out the optimal revenue per ride. B. TLDR Summary · With a target market of (~100K-138K) consumers, on a $25 charge to consumers, Lyft should pay $20.75 to drivers and fix its share at $4.25 to maximize its net revenues over a 12-mont"See full answer

Praveen - "I will start with discussing the Google mission statement, which is to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible to everyone to help them get things done, and make their day a bit easier. I will think about building something that will leapfrog this mission. Google has already organized all of the world's public digital information in the current state. There are opportunities to get more information into a digital form. But there are also significant improvements in mak"See full answer

Rui B. - "Clarification and Assumption In house labeling vs outsourced? labeling text, images, bounding boxes, segmentations etc? what kind of issues have we observed? Assuming that data collection and pre/post-processing is done by different team and labeling starts with receiving data and ends with sending files back to my team. "outsourced, images containing objects, 2 dozen classes of objects to label bounding boxes." 2.Goal Quality is important because downstream effect. garbage in garbage out."See full answer

Michael N. - "The pain points articulated (no contextual recs, isolating experience, etc.) are pain points in the broader audio listening industry - there's no existing audio product at Meta already and assuming this is a net new product, wouldn't it have made more sense to have pain points specific to Meta? E.g. "there's no sense of real-time community in FB Groups" or "the barrier to engage in FB groups feels high" It almost feels like she just regurgitated things she's learned from her time working on Alex"See full answer

Aswath B. - "basic drew the diagram"See full answer

Amit T. - "Question Design a product for P2P borrowing & lending money Clarifications Is this only P2P borrowing/lending or can financial entities participate too? - P2P only Is it to borrow/lend physical cash/digital money/cryptocurrency? - digital fiat money Are we focusing on specific geography? - US What’s the goal of this product? - Retention Are there any resource constraints? - No What’s the timeline to launch MVP? - 6 months FB Mission Empower people to build commun"See full answer

P K. - "Note: Modifying the question to reflect the storage cost as well. Question: Estimate the cost of storing google photos on the photos app? Clarifying questions: Google photos - an app that syncs automatically to your camera app and uploads photos to Google cloud and reduces the need to store it on your device Cost of 1GB storage $0.002 Time storage cost per year Equation: Cost of storage per year = average cost of storing photos per day x 30 days x 12 months The ave"See full answer