TikTok Product Sense: Choose a Segment, Find Its Biggest Pain Point and Design a Fix

You are a product manager at TikTok, the app built around a feed of short videos that people watch, create and share. The interviewer's brief is deliberately open: make TikTok better. Decide what "better" should mean, choose whom to build for, and propose the improvement you would ship first, along with how you would know it worked. ```hint Viewers, creators or businesses TikTok serves people who watch, people who post and businesses that advertise or sell. Before listing features, decide whose unmet need moves your chosen goal the most, and check whether the app already handles that need well. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What should the improvement move: engagement and retention of existing users, growth in new users, creator supply, or revenue? - Is the whole app in scope, or one surface such as the For You feed, search, messages, LIVE or the creation tools? - Is the change global, or aimed at one market where TikTok's position differs? - Are changes to how the feed ranks videos in scope, or only the product surfaces and tools around it? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear definition of "better" tied to TikTok's mission and its scale, with the alternative goals considered - Segments on both sides of the platform and a justified choice of which one to serve - Pain points specific to that segment's experience of TikTok, ranked by impact on users and on the goal - A few distinct solutions, one chosen with its trade-offs and a shippable first version - Success metrics with guardrails for user well-being, content quality and the other side of the marketplace ### Follow-up Questions - Your change raises time spent, but surveys show people feel worse about how much they scroll. Is it a win? - Creator-side changes reach viewers only weeks later, and creators compete for the same viewers. How would you design the experiment and read its results? - How would your plan differ in a market where most people are new to short video versus one where TikTok is already saturated?