Product design question
Walk me through how you would think about whether to build a travel product on Instagram.
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Structured strategic evaluation of whether to enter an adjacent product category, weighing user need against platform fit.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal, driving engagement, ad revenue, or competing with dedicated travel platforms like TripAdvisor.
- Assess user behavior signals, do Instagram users already use the platform for travel inspiration via hashtags and location tags today.
- Evaluate strategic fit, Instagram's strength is visual discovery and inspiration, not transactional booking, so a travel product should lean into that.
- Weigh build cost against value, a lightweight discovery layer, e.g. curated destination guides from location tags, costs far less than a booking engine.
- Recommend a scoped approach, enhance travel discovery and inspiration features rather than building full booking and itinerary tools.
- Define success metrics, saves and shares of travel content and time spent in a travel-focused discovery surface.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the recommendation in existing user behavior, e.g. location tags and travel hashtags already used organically on Instagram.
- Distinguishes inspiration and discovery, Instagram's core strength, from transactional booking, which is a different, harder business to build.
- Proposes a scoped, low-risk starting point, a discovery layer, rather than a full travel booking platform.
- Sets a metric aligned with the platform's actual strength, content saves and shares, not booking conversion.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a full booking and payments product without acknowledging the build complexity and risk.
- Ignoring existing organic travel behavior already happening on Instagram as a validation signal.
- Not considering whether this fits Instagram's core visual discovery identity.
Likely follow-up questions
- Would you build booking capability eventually, and if so when.
- How would you measure whether users want this beyond inspiration.
- How would this compete with dedicated travel apps.
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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