Designing a Mobile Product for Parking Garages: Drivers, Operators and Metrics
Company: Uber
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a mobile app for a parking garage. Decide whose problem the app should solve, pick the users and the moments of a garage visit you would focus on, propose and prioritize features, and explain how you would tell whether the app is working.
```hint Walk through one visit
Follow a driver from choosing where to park to leaving through the exit gate, and note each point where time, money or certainty is lost. Then look at the same visit from the garage operator's side.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Who is the app for: drivers who park, the operator who runs the garage, or both sides at once?
- Is it for a single garage, a company that runs many garages, or a platform listing garages from many independent owners? Is it a standalone app or a feature inside an existing mobility app?
- Which kind of parking matters most: daily commuters on monthly passes, shoppers and diners staying a few hours, event crowds, or airport travelers?
- Is a business goal already set, such as filling empty spaces, raising revenue per space, or reducing staff at entry and exit booths?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated goal for the app and a deliberate choice of primary user, with the other side of the garage relationship accounted for.
- Pain points traced through the stages of a garage visit, ranked by how often they occur and how much they hurt.
- A prioritized feature set with a clear first version, and the garage hardware or system integrations each feature depends on.
- Success metrics tied to the goal, with guardrails.
- Risks such as wrong availability data, gate or payment failures, weak connectivity underground, and the privacy of location and vehicle data.
### Follow-up Questions
- Occupancy sensors in many garages are unreliable. How does that change what you promise drivers about available spaces?
- How would you persuade garage operators to join when their existing ticket machines and gates already work?
- Drivers want to reserve spaces ahead of a big concert nearby. What changes in the product and in how spaces are allocated?
Overview: A product design exercise asking candidates to design a mobile app for a parking garage. It tests choosing between drivers and garage operators as the primary user, mapping pain points across a garage visit, prioritizing features under hardware and integration limits, and defining success metrics with guardrails.