I had my screening a month or so ago and then had my product design interviews scheduled last week. Writing this post so that others can learn from the mistakes I made.

Round 1 - Design a money transfer application
Round 2 - Design a concert ticketing application

The designs asked were very simple and straight forward. First round was to design a money transfer application. Given requirements were that money must be transferrable between two parties and that the user must be able to check balance. Was asked to design the various components and architecture for this. The interviewer mentioned that it would be a conversation kind of a discussion but unfortunately most of the time I was just waiting for my interviewer to reply and could hardly do much except the 3 layer architecture at a high level.

So for the second interview I took the lead and kept on explaining the various components, trade offs, network protocols, DB decisions, logging, analytics etc etc when asked to build a concert ticketing system.

So anyone preparing for the design interviews please remember to take lead and if you are digressing , that is only when the interviewer might nudge you in the right direction, else do not expect them to ask you or lead you. Hope this helps. Thank you!