Product design question
How would you improve a trip organiser app like TripCase or TripIt?
- Airbnb
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product improvement thinking for a utility travel app: finding a specific, high value gap in trip organization tools.
How to approach it
- Define the core user: a traveler juggling multiple bookings, flights, hotels, and activities, across different confirmation emails.
- Identify the current gap: manual email forwarding for itinerary parsing is often error prone or misses non email bookings like local activities.
- Propose an improvement: broader auto import from booking sources plus real time disruption alerts, like flight delays, tied directly to the itinerary.
- Address a monetization or retention angle, such as proactive rebooking suggestions during disruptions, increasing daily relevance beyond pre trip planning.
- Define success: percentage of a user's bookings successfully auto captured without manual entry.
- State the assumption about which travel segment, business or leisure, you are optimizing for.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies a specific gap, incomplete auto import missing local activity or ground transport bookings, and proposes broader source coverage.
- Proposes real time disruption alerts tied to the itinerary, like automatic rebooking suggestions during a flight delay, adding value during the trip, not just before it.
- Suggests integrating local recommendations near confirmed bookings, increasing daily app relevance during the actual travel window.
- Sets a measurable goal, for example a stated increase in percentage of bookings auto captured without manual entry.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI polish instead of addressing the core auto import completeness gap that drives daily reliance.
- Ignoring the opportunity to add value during the trip itself, not just in pre trip planning.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle bookings that cannot be auto parsed from an email?
- What would make a user trust this over manually checking their airline app directly?
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More questions from Airbnb
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