Product design question
How would you improve TripAdvisor?
- Expedia
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product improvement thinking for a mature travel platform, checking you can find a specific, high-leverage gap rather than a broad feature wishlist.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope, whether the focus is trip planning, in-destination use, or review trustworthiness, since TripAdvisor spans all three.
- Identify the target user and moment, for example a traveler comparing reviews while deciding where to eat right now, versus someone planning months ahead.
- List pain points: review trustworthiness and staleness, generic recommendations not tailored to the traveler's specific trip context, and outdated business information.
- Propose the design: a trust and recency signal surfaced prominently on reviews, combined with contextual recommendations based on current location and time of day.
- Prioritize review trust and recency first, since that is TripAdvisor's core value proposition and its biggest erosion point against newer alternatives.
- Define success as review engagement and click-through to booking or reservation actions, confirming whether monetization impact is in scope.
What a strong answer includes
- Names review trust and staleness as the sharpest erosion point for TripAdvisor specifically, given competition from real-time sources like Google Maps and Instagram.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, a visible recency and verified-visit signal on reviews, to rebuild trust rather than a generic UI refresh.
- Connects the improvement to TripAdvisor's actual competitive threat, not a random feature idea disconnected from market context.
- Sets a measurable success metric, like click-through from reviews to booking actions, tying the fix to business impact.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI polish with no tie to TripAdvisor's specific competitive weaknesses.
- Ignoring review trust and recency, which is widely known as TripAdvisor's core challenge against newer platforms.
- Not connecting the improvement to any measurable business outcome.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you verify a review's recency or authenticity at scale?
- How would you measure whether trust in reviews actually improved after this change?
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More questions from Expedia
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