Question bank / Product, System Design, Advanced
How to answer: Design the product and success metrics for a collaborative document approval workflow.
Whether you design from the user's journey and define how you would know it works.
What the interviewer is testing.
User journeys, states, permissions, metrics. Whether you design from the user's journey and define how you would know it works.
An outline for this question.
- Name the users: the person who submits, the approver, and anyone who only needs to see the result.
- Walk the states: draft, submitted, in review, changes requested, approved, rejected.
- Cover permissions and the cases that go wrong: absent approver, edits after approval.
- Define success: time to approval, share approved on first review, and a guardrail such as rework rate.
The mistake to avoid.
Listing features without states. A workflow is defined by what can happen next from each state.
The general method: requirements, design, trade-offs.
The same shape works for most system design questions, whatever the topic.
- Pin down what the system must do, how many users, and what matters most (speed, cost, correctness).
- Sketch the main parts and how data moves between them, starting simple.
- Pick one or two parts to go deep on, and say what you gave up for each choice.
- Finish with how it fails and how you would know: monitoring, retries, limits.
Practice it, out loud.
Reading an outline is not the same as saying it. Answer this question in a mock interview, in your own words, then compare it with the outline above.
More to practice.
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This is a Replysis practice question. It is not a leaked or official question from any company, and the outline is a guide to structure, not a script. Use your own experience and facts.