Design a smart garage door opener focused on safety and accessibility

Design a next-generation smart garage door opener focused on home safety and accessibility.

Context

Garage doors are a common break-in route and a crushing hazard for children and pets. Many users forget to close them; older users and wheelchair users struggle with remotes and wall buttons.

Clarifying questions to ask first

Retrofit or new install?
Must it work without internet?
Price constraints?

How to approach it

Clarify the business goal and tie the product to the company's mission before touching solutions
Segment users by behaviour or need (not just age), cover the whole ecosystem, and pick one segment with explicit criteria
Walk the end-to-end journey and separate real pain points from feature requests
Brainstorm a range of solutions (quick fix, data/ML, moonshot) and prioritise with impact vs effort
Define a North Star, funnel metrics and guardrails, then call out risks, edge cases and mitigations

Framework: Goal & mission -> Ecosystem & segment choice -> Journey & pain points -> Solutions & prioritisation -> Metrics & guardrails -> Risks & edge cases

Sample answer

Families with small kids/pets, people with mobility limits, frequent travellers
Forgetting the door open and unsafe closing are the top risks
Connectivity cannot be a single point of failure

Solutions: auto-close with obstruction sensing, open-door alerts, geofenced open/close, voice and large-button controls, manual override
Metrics: North Star = nights with door secured; guardrails = false-close incidents, app disconnects

Auto-close with obstruction sensing, open-door alerts and accessible controls, all working offline. Measure secured nights, guarded by false closes.

What interviewers look for

Safety-first framing
Segmentation by need
Failure modes (power, connectivity)
Simplicity