B2B Product Design: Specify an Elevator System Around a Building Client's Needs
Company: Mastercard
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a PM at a company that builds and installs elevators. Design an elevator for one of your clients.
```hint Separate the buyer from the riders
The client who signs the contract is rarely the person waiting for a car every morning. Pin down what kind of building this is before choosing features, because that decides who rides, when, and what they bring with them.
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### Clarifying Questions
- What kind of building is the client putting up: an office tower, a hospital, a residential block, or a shopping center?
- Is this new construction, or a replacement in an existing building whose shafts are already fixed?
- What matters most to the client: upfront cost, the experience of tenants, energy use, or uptime?
- Are we designing a single elevator, or the full set of elevators that serves the building?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Who the paying client is versus the people who ride, run, maintain and inspect the elevator, and whose needs drive which decisions.
- How the building's traffic pattern becomes requirements for capacity, waiting time and car size.
- Concrete features prioritized against cost, space in the building, and safety and accessibility codes.
- Success measures across the elevator's whole service life, not just at handover.
- Risks such as code compliance, entrapments, long lead times and maintenance cost.
### Follow-up Questions
- The client asks to drop one elevator from the plan to save money. How do you respond?
- How would your design change if the client were a hospital?
- Once the elevators are running, how would you use data from them to improve service or win the next contract?
Overview: A product design question set at an elevator manufacturer: design an elevator for a client. It tests separating the paying building owner from riders and maintainers, turning traffic patterns into capacity requirements, prioritizing features against cost, space and safety codes, and measuring success over the equipment's life.