Airbnb · Strategy · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Airbnb refocus search and booking?

Airbnb is an online marketplace where people book stays hosted by individuals and property owners. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Strategic prioritization
Marketplace thinking
User insight
Metric design
Stakeholder judgment

The situation

It is March 2020. You are a PM responsible for Airbnb's guest search and booking experience. Your VP wants a recommendation by next week on how this product area should operate for the next quarter. Bookings have effectively stopped, revenue is down 80 percent within weeks, and the roadmap built for normal leisure travel no longer looks credible. Support volume is surging around cancellations and refunds. At the same time, the small amount of remaining demand appears to be changing shape: some users are searching closer to home, some seem interested in longer stays, and many are highly sensitive to uncertainty about whether they can travel at all. Hosts are anxious about lost income and any policy changes that might shift more risk onto them. Leadership is open to pausing major projects, but expects product to protect trust, preserve scarce engineering capacity, and avoid moves that could weaken the marketplace. You need to recommend where the product should focus now, what to stop doing, and how to balance urgent fixes with a clearer strategy for an unpredictable travel environment.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page product strategy memo.

Your answer must

State your diagnosis of what has changed in customer behavior and which demand Airbnb should still serve in the near term.
Define one primary objective for the next 90 days and explain why it is better than at least one plausible alternative objective.
Recommend three prioritized product actions across search, discovery, booking, or policy UX, and name two things you would pause, cut, or de-emphasize.
Explain how your plan balances guest trust, host trust, and marketplace health during cancellations and uncertainty.
Specify 3 to 5 metrics, including leading indicators and decision triggers that would cause you to adjust the plan.

Constraints

Assume the team can deliver at most two medium-sized changes and several small fixes in the next 8 weeks.
Travel restrictions and customer behavior may change weekly, so your plan cannot depend on a single forecast of recovery.
Airbnb is a two-sided marketplace of independent hosts and guests, so solutions must work without heavy manual operations and should consider supply-side trust.

Format

Use sections for diagnosis, objective, priorities, trade-offs, metrics, and risks.

How Airbnb actually played it

Covers Airbnb in 2020 as bookings halted and revenue fell sharply, and how the team refocused the product.

A crisis forces a clear priority list
Refocus on the core use case
Rebuild around changed customer behavior

Built from Building during crisis: how Airbnb refocused and rebuilt by Sreerag Panat.