Product Design Case: Organizing the Daily Timetable of a High School
Company: Yahoo
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are asked to design a product that organizes how each school day runs at a high school. The prompt is open-ended on purpose, so deciding what the system does and whom it serves is part of the task. The interviewer sets three boundaries:
- the user interface, including how people enter schedule information, is out of scope;
- scheduling for parents is out of scope;
- seasonal activities such as sports and extracurriculars can be ignored.
The interviewer also suggests that lunch schedules are worth thinking about.
```hint List the collisions
Start by listing what must never clash (a person, a room, a time slot) and what is only preferred, then see where lunch sits on that list.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the main user the staff member who builds the schedule, or the students and teachers who follow it each day?
- Should the system produce the term's master timetable, handle day-to-day changes such as absent teachers and assemblies, or both?
- Does the school run the same periods every day, or rotate between day types such as A and B days?
- Are the school's enrollment and cafeteria size known, or should I assume them?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A primary user and core job for the system, chosen with a reason and kept inside the interviewer's boundaries
- The entities being scheduled and the hard versus soft constraints among them, lunch included
- How a conflict-free schedule gets produced and how it adapts when a day is disrupted
- A prioritized first version, with what is deferred and why
- Success metrics and the main risks, such as fairness across students and the quality of the underlying data
### Follow-up Questions
- How would the system handle a day when a large share of students are out of class for standardized testing?
- What changes if the school moves from fixed daily periods to a rotating block schedule?
- Students complain that the same group always gets the latest lunch. What would you change?
Overview: A product design case asking you to design a system that organizes the daily schedule of a high school, with input screens, parent scheduling and seasonal activities out of scope. It tests how you choose users, model scheduling constraints such as lunch periods, prioritize a first version and define success metrics.