Product design question
How would you improve the worst post-booking experience on Opentable?
- DoorDash
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Identifying and prioritizing the single weakest part of an existing, well-known reservation journey.
How to approach it
- Clarify 'post-booking': the period between confirmation and arrival or dining, and possibly post-meal follow-up.
- Identify likely pain points: no easy way to modify or cancel, uncertainty about wait times on arrival despite a reservation, and no way to send special requests.
- Prioritize by severity: arriving on time but still waiting despite a reservation is the most damaging trust issue.
- Propose real-time table-ready notifications and a live wait-time estimate before the reservation, similar to flight-status updates.
- Add a lighter fix: one-tap modify or cancel, and pre-arrival special requests sent directly to the restaurant.
- Define success as fewer 'arrived but had to wait' complaints and a higher modify-versus-no-show rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks the specific, most damaging pain point, a reservation not guaranteeing no wait, rather than a generic list of improvements.
- Draws a concrete analogy, flight-status-style live updates, to ground the proposed solution.
- Ties the fix to trust, the core value a reservation platform sells, not just convenience.
Common mistakes
- Listing several shallow ideas without picking and defending the single highest-impact one.
- Ignoring that this requires restaurant-side, not just app-side, behavior change, a real constraint.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get restaurants to actually update table status in real time?
- What would you measure to know this improved trust?
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More questions from DoorDash
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