Product design question
You're the CEO of a startup and you want to do something innovative in travel. What should you build? (Only constraint is that it's a software product)
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests founder-level product thinking: picking a specific, defensible opportunity in a broad domain and reasoning through why it is worth building as a software-only product.
How to approach it
- Narrow the domain: travel is broad, so pick a specific underserved moment, such as trip planning for multi-destination trips, which is notoriously fragmented across many apps.
- Identify the pain point: travelers juggle flights, hotels, activities, and itineraries across separate apps and spreadsheets with no unified, collaborative view.
- Propose the product: a collaborative trip-planning tool that aggregates bookings, suggests itinerary optimization, and lets travel companions co-edit in real time.
- Address the software-only constraint: rely on existing booking APIs and partnerships rather than building logistics or fulfillment infrastructure.
- Define the MVP: start with itinerary aggregation and collaboration for group trips, the most painful and differentiated part, before adding booking or monetization features.
- Define success: number of trips actively planned collaboratively and completed, and a monetization path through affiliate booking commissions.
What a strong answer includes
- Narrows an intentionally broad prompt to one specific, well-known pain point, fragmented multi-destination trip planning, instead of proposing a vague 'travel app.'
- Respects the software-only constraint explicitly, relying on booking APIs and affiliate partnerships rather than proposing physical infrastructure.
- Chooses collaboration as the differentiator, since existing tools (flight and hotel booking sites) already solve individual booking but not group coordination.
- Proposes a realistic monetization path, affiliate commissions on bookings, consistent with how comparable travel products actually make money.
Common mistakes
- Proposing something that requires physical infrastructure or logistics, violating the software-only constraint.
- Staying too broad ('a travel app that does everything') instead of committing to one specific, defensible wedge.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get your first users without an existing distribution channel?
- How would you compete if Google or a major OTA copied this feature?
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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