Product design question
Design a travel planning Mobile app.
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Baseline product design in a crowded category: can you find a genuine differentiator for travel planning instead of rebuilding a generic itinerary app.
How to approach it
- Define the user, assume independent travelers planning multi day trips who currently juggle several disconnected tools, maps, booking sites, and notes apps.
- Identify the real pain point: fragmenting research and bookings across many tabs and apps, and then struggling to turn that research into a coherent day by day plan.
- Prioritize a single itinerary builder that pulls in saved places, bookings, and travel times automatically, over yet another place to browse recommendations.
- Design the core feature: a day by day timeline view showing bookings and saved spots with automatic travel time estimates between them, flagging unrealistic scheduling.
- Add collaborative planning, since many trips are planned with others, allowing shared editing and voting on options.
- Define success as percentage of a trip's activities actually completed as planned, and repeat use for future trips.
What a strong answer includes
- Targets the consolidation and scheduling problem specifically, the real gap versus generic recommendation browsing apps already common in this space.
- Adds collaborative planning, recognizing most trips involve more than one decision maker.
- Picks a completion rate metric, which reflects whether the plan was actually usable, not just how nice it looked.
Common mistakes
- Building another place to discover destinations, duplicating existing apps rather than solving the consolidation problem.
- Ignoring the collaborative nature of most trip planning.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle real time changes, like a delayed flight, to the plan?
- How would you monetize this without becoming another booking commission site?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop