Bicycle rental business: customer journey, pickup and return flow, and fleet metrics
Company: Wayfair
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a bike rental shop. Decide what kind of rental business it is and who rents from it, find out what frustrates those customers about renting a bike today, design the rental experience and the features that fix it, and explain how you would measure whether the shop is doing well.
```hint Walk through one rental
Follow a single customer from the moment they decide to rent until the bike is back in the rack. Note every point where they wait, worry or give up; those moments matter more than which bikes are on offer.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is this a staffed physical shop, a self-service rental network, or the app and website a shop uses to take rentals?
- Where is the shop and who walks in: visitors exploring a destination, local residents riding for fun, or people who need a bike for weeks or months?
- Is the shop new, or an existing business trying to grow or fix a specific problem?
- Which bikes are we renting: standard bikes only, or also electric bikes, children's bikes and specialty bikes such as tandems or mountain bikes?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear choice of rental model and setting, and a goal for the shop expressed in business terms such as revenue per bike or fleet utilization.
- Customer segments with a reasoned primary segment, plus the staff and mechanics who run the shop as users of the system too.
- The full rental journey (finding the shop, reserving, pickup, the ride, return) with the chosen segment's pain points at each step.
- Prioritized solutions that weigh customer convenience against operating realities: maintenance, damage, theft, no-shows and weather-driven demand.
- Success metrics with guardrails such as loss and damage cost, safety incidents and review ratings.
### Follow-up Questions
- Rainy days leave most bikes idle while sunny holiday weekends sell out early. How would pricing, reservations or staffing respond?
- How would you set the deposit and damage policy, and what happens when a customer returns a bike with a broken part?
- When would you add electric bikes, and what would change in your operations and safety rules?
Overview: A product sense prompt that asks you to design a bicycle rental business, from choosing its rental model and target customers to shaping reservation, pickup, the ride and return. It tests customer journey thinking, balancing convenience against fleet operations such as maintenance, damage and weather-driven demand, and choosing utilization-based metrics.