Product design question
How would you improve Yelp for businesses? What metrics would you collect?
- Yelp
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests two-sided product improvement thinking for a review platform's business-facing side, balancing business value with the trust that keeps reviews credible.
How to approach it
- Identify the business user's pain points: limited visibility into what drives their rating, difficulty responding effectively to negative reviews, and unclear ROI from Yelp's paid advertising products.
- Prioritize the core problem: businesses often feel they lack actionable insight into why their rating is what it is and what specifically to improve.
- Propose the solution: an analytics dashboard surfacing sentiment themes from reviews (service speed, cleanliness, value) so businesses know exactly what to act on, not just a star average.
- Propose a second improvement: streamlined, guided response templates and best-practice prompts for responding to negative reviews professionally and quickly.
- Preserve trust as a constraint: any business-facing tool must not let businesses manipulate or suppress genuine reviews, since consumer trust is Yelp's core asset.
- Metrics to collect: review sentiment breakdown by theme, business response rate and speed, and correlation between response behavior and subsequent rating trend.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies actionable insight, not just visibility, as the core business pain point, proposing sentiment-theme analytics rather than a superficial dashboard refresh.
- Adds a concrete second improvement, guided response tooling, addressing a distinct and equally real business pain point around handling negative reviews.
- Explicitly protects consumer trust as a constraint on any business-facing feature, correctly recognizing that unbiased reviews are Yelp's core asset.
- Names specific, useful metrics (sentiment themes, response rate, rating correlation) rather than a vague 'business satisfaction' metric.
Common mistakes
- Proposing features that could let businesses suppress or manipulate negative reviews, undermining consumer trust.
- Suggesting only surface-level dashboard changes without addressing the deeper need for actionable insight.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent businesses from gaming the sentiment analytics to look better than they are?
- How would you measure whether businesses using the new tools actually improve their real-world service, not just their review handling?
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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