Metrics question
Assume you are a product manager for Airbnb. There are two problems to solve: customers being unable to check-in, and customers having a dirty place. How would you prioritize these issues?
- DoorDash
- Metrics
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Tests prioritization reasoning between two real problems, requiring a framework (impact, frequency, severity) rather than a gut pick.
How to approach it
- Clarify the frame: prioritize based on frequency, severity of impact on the stay, and downstream effect on trust and repeat booking, not just which sounds worse.
- Assess check-in failures: this is typically a hard blocker, an urgent, trip-ruining event that generates immediate high-severity complaints and likely refund/support escalations.
- Assess cleanliness issues: this is usually a quality complaint, serious but less likely to be a total trip blocker, though it damages trust and review scores over time.
- Prioritize check-in issues first, since it's a harder failure (guest literally can't start their stay) with more acute urgency, while addressing cleanliness in parallel via host standards enforcement.
- Define success for each separately: check-in issue rate and resolution time for the urgent fix, and average cleanliness rating trend for the host-standards fix.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses a clear framework, severity and urgency, to justify prioritizing check-in over cleanliness, rather than an unexplained preference.
- Recognizes check-in failure as effectively a harder, more acute blocker (guest can't start their stay at all) than a cleanliness complaint.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume check-in failures drive 3x more same-day support escalations than cleanliness complaints, to justify the priority order.
- Proposes addressing both, not ignoring one, since cleanliness still causes real long-term trust and rating damage even if it's the second priority.
Common mistakes
- Picking one issue to prioritize without a clear, stated framework for why.
- Treating the deprioritized issue as unimportant rather than acknowledging its real, longer-term cost to trust and ratings.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure the true business cost of each problem to validate your prioritization?
- What would change your prioritization between these two issues?
More metrics questions
- How would you measure the success of Facebook Likes?Meta · Metrics · Medium
- Walmart's order return rate is increasing. As a product manager, what things would you look into to isolate the problem?Amazon · Metrics · Medium
- What metrics would you track if you were PM of Facebook Birthdays?Metrics · Medium
- How do you define success for Yelp reviews?Google · Metrics · Medium
- Utilization went down by 45% on app XYZ in Italy for the month of August. Give a reason why and draft a plan to fix it.Spotify · Metrics · Medium
- Define the metrics for YouTube search.Google · Metrics · Medium
More questions from DoorDash
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop