Design an MVP That Fills Hair Salons' Idle Off-Peak Chair Time
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Hair salons are often packed during a few busy stretches and then sit almost empty for the rest of the day. Design a minimum viable product that helps salons make better use of their capacity. Say whom you are building for, which part of the problem the first version solves, what it includes and leaves out, and how you would know it works.
```hint Find the costly hour
Before designing, work out whether a salon loses more from customers it turns away at busy times or from staff and chairs sitting idle at quiet times. The answer decides whether the product should move demand, add demand or change staffing.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Are we building for independent salons with a handful of chairs or for chains, and who pays: the salon or its customers?
- How are stylists paid (salary, commission or renting their own chair)? That decides who bears the cost of an empty hour.
- Do salons already take bookings through software, or mostly by phone and walk-in?
- Is this a standalone product, or part of an existing booking or local-business platform?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear primary user among salon owners, stylists and customers, justified by who bears the cost of idle chair time
- A diagnosis of why demand bunches up and which customers could come at quiet times
- A narrowly scoped first version with stated non-goals and a cheap way to test demand before building
- A utilization-based success metric with guardrails for discount cannibalization, busy-hour revenue and stylist earnings
- Risks such as cheapening the salon's brand, no-shows and too few flexible customers at launch
### Follow-up Questions
- Quiet-hour bookings rise, but total revenue is flat because regulars moved from full-price busy slots to discounted quiet ones. What do you change?
- How would the product differ for a salon where stylists rent their chairs and keep their own client lists?
- Once the first version works, how would you grow it into a business, and how would you charge for it?
Overview: A product design question asking for a minimum viable product that helps hair salons fill the quiet hours between their busy periods. It tests choosing the right user, diagnosing why demand clusters, scoping a testable first version, and measuring utilization without cannibalizing full-price bookings.