A thread on answering interview questions questions which sound like trivia quizzes: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1309359528836648961

You need to have a theory of the mind of the interviewer. In this case, that question looks like it has three variables in it: Chile, Internet cafe, $80.

Playing three steps ahead, you can already predict that the interviewer is going to have you redo your answer w/ new vars.

And you need to understand that, unless you are being specifically hired for Head of Latam Payments, you are almost certainly not being scored for understanding of the peculiarities of Chilean payments systems in particular.

(Reporting, not endorsing, about this quirk of tech.)

You should almost always respond to a question like this by first probing for more detail. That will both inform your actual answer and also inform how you play the rest of the question.

You can literally ask the interviewer for their rubric, and many will give it to you!

"Sure. Obviously there are a lot of ways to do that. Before we get into the weeds, what would you like me to optimize this answer for?"

You might get a very contentful answer there ("Ah good question. I'm interested in you maximizing for the user experience.") or a very contentfree answer ("I want to hear how you think.")

"Got it. Who is 'we' here? My answer will depend on, for example, what our business model is, what our relationship with the Internet cafe is, and whether we have a Chilean subsidiary with a bank account available. Would you like to provide me with these or should I assert some?"

At this point, you will either be given a scenario or you're going to totally ROFLstomp the underprepared interviewer.

It will generally sound like:

"New US based marketplace startup. No fancy setup. Nothing in Chile; tell me if you would change that."

"That is also an interesting question. I would certainly change that if we had a material business in Chile. Probably something on the order of $10M in margin a year implying, oh I'll assume a 10% take rate, $100M in volume transacted in Chile. Can I assume we don't have that?"

The interviewer will agree that you don't have that so that the interview can continue down a useful path, because otherwise you just say "Open a company in Chile; this is now a boring problem from the standard of a PM interview question."

You just got some savviness points.

Then you continue down this branching dialogue, by turns asking for information and leading the witness. Is this a typical-sized transfer for the business? What's the volume of them? ("Why do you care?" "Well if it's a one-off we can lose money. If it's 1k times a day prob not")

And then at some point down the line you dribble out desiderata for the actual content-containing answers, which might sound like "wire", "local bank transfer through an affiliate", "we just Paypal them", etc.

Or even Bitcoin, though you should be prepared to talk downsides.

Do I love this dance? Not so much, because it is a culturally significant ritual *which is trainable and not actually trained.*

The closest analogy I can think of is the SAT analogies question, which is one of only places where test prep helps because they're so artificial.

Anyhow, your interviewer is going to at some point say "Now make that answer generalizable for LatAm" or "Now what if we have $8 to $8k invoices?" or similar.

Which you do the same dance on. Which, if you answered #1 like someone who knows the game, you'll thoroughly crush.

There's a lot of *actual content* for this answer which I'm glossing over. These questions do actually detect some degree of familiarity with the subject matter. Some issues to cover: tax implications, regulatory, KYC, AML, vendor selection, etc etc.

Note that you don't necessarily have to have experience in payments specifically to know that these could plausibly be issues, and that being caught cold on them *is fine*, because you are working at a company.

"Do we have an AML strategy in place for Chile?"
"I dunno do we?"

"Not being an expert in AML regulations in Chile, I would note this on my project plan and schedule a meeting with inhouse counsel or external counsel after the project brief was reasonably stable but before starting actual work.

Moving on, what is our KYC strategy?"

(One of the downsides of this form of interviewing: it is believed to select for domain expertise or trainability. It doesn't. If you're playing the game well, it weights breadth of knowledge a little, character acting skill quite a bit, and improv skill heavily.)

(Like, I probably actually know this question well enough to have legitimate contentful answers in payments, but if you asked me about administering vaccines in Subsaharan Africa, I could probably talk intelligently enough for an hour to get highest possible rating on interview.)

(And this cross-applicability of "the skill of interviewing well" to nearly all job interviews as the tech industry conducts them is not treated as a reason to be deeply, deeply suspicious about both the form of interviews and any results from them, which strikes me as strange.)