Product design question
How would you solve OpenTable's worst customer experience?
- DoorDash
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests product diagnosis and design for a specific, high-friction moment in a reservation marketplace, requiring the candidate to identify and defend the single worst pain point.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: could be the diner or the restaurant; assume the diner's perspective first, as the primary consumer-facing side of the marketplace.
- Identify the candidate worst experience: a confirmed reservation not being honored on arrival, a high-stakes trust failure undermining the platform's core promise.
- Justify why this is the worst versus other friction points, like a clunky search filter: it happens in person, at the least recoverable moment, often with a group waiting.
- Propose a real-time confirmation handshake where the restaurant must actively confirm holding the table shortly before arrival, with an automated rebooking or fallback flow if it can't.
- Address the restaurant side: give restaurants an easy one-tap running-behind status update to reduce diners showing up to zero communication.
- Define success: rate of honored reservations without diner complaints, and reduction in no-table-available support tickets.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies and defends a specific worst experience, a reservation not honored, rather than listing minor issues with no prioritization.
- Explains why this specific failure is worse than others, using the in-person, unrecoverable, waiting-group context.
- Proposes a concrete two-sided mechanism, a pre-arrival confirmation handshake plus a fallback flow, addressing both diner trust and restaurant reality.
- Defines success with a metric tied precisely to the identified failure mode, not a generic satisfaction score.
Common mistakes
- Listing several minor UI complaints without committing to and defending one as the worst.
- Proposing a diner-only fix that ignores the restaurant operational side, equally responsible for this failure mode.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a rebooking fallback when no comparable nearby table exists?
- How would you measure whether restaurants are complying with the confirmation handshake?
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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