Product design question
How will you design a travel feature for Pinterest?
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product sense for extending a visual-discovery platform into a new vertical while staying true to its core use case, inspiration, not transactional booking.
How to approach it
- Identify Pinterest's core behavior in travel today: users already save destination and itinerary inspiration boards.
- Define the target user: someone in the early dreaming and planning phase of a trip, Pinterest's actual strength versus a booking site like Expedia.
- Propose turning saved pins into an actionable itinerary, auto-organizing travel pins by destination and suggesting a day-by-day plan, staying in the inspiration-to-planning zone.
- Add a monetization angle: affiliate links to booking partners once a user has an organized itinerary, fitting Pinterest's existing ad and affiliate model.
- Define success as percent of travel-board users converting to the itinerary tool, and time from save to itinerary creation.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the feature in Pinterest's existing travel-board behavior rather than inventing a booking engine from scratch.
- Explains why staying in inspiration-to-planning, not booking, plays to Pinterest's strength and avoids competing head-on with Expedia or Google.
- Names a monetization path consistent with Pinterest's actual business model.
Common mistakes
- Designing a full booking flow, a different core competency that ignores what makes Pinterest distinct.
- Not tying the feature back to Pinterest's existing ad and affiliate monetization model.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you partner with booking sites without becoming just a lead-gen tool for them?
- How would you measure if this increases or cannibalizes Pinterest's core pinning behavior?
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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