Product design question
How would you design a travel app specifically for families?
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a segment with distinct planning and in trip needs compared to solo or couple travelers.
How to approach it
- Clarify the segment: families traveling with children of varying ages, who have different planning and in trip needs than solo travelers.
- List core pain points: finding family friendly activities and accommodations, coordinating multiple people's schedules and preferences, and managing kids' entertainment during transit and downtime.
- Segment further: families with young children needing naps and simple activities versus families with teens wanting more independence.
- Prioritize the planning and coordination pain point, since fragmented research across many sources is the biggest friction before a trip even starts.
- Propose family specific filters, like kid friendly ratings and stroller accessibility, a shared itinerary all family members can view, and curated activity suggestions by child age group.
- Define success as itinerary completion rate before travel and repeat booking rate among families with children.
What a strong answer includes
- Segments families further by child age, since a family with toddlers and a family with teens need very different features.
- Identifies planning fragmentation, not in trip features, as the primary pain point worth prioritizing first.
- Gives an illustrative number, for example assuming families using age based activity curation report higher trip satisfaction.
- Proposes concrete, checkable filters, like stroller accessibility, rather than a vague family friendly label.
Common mistakes
- Treating families as one uniform segment without accounting for how needs shift dramatically by child age.
- Proposing generic travel app features with a family label instead of addressing family specific coordination pain points.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle conflicting preferences between family members when curating a shared itinerary?
- How would you validate which family sub-segment, young kids versus teens, to prioritize first?
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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