Choose and Scope a New Software Product for a Travel Startup
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Imagine you are the founder and CEO of a startup that wants to do something genuinely new in travel. The only constraint is that the product must be software. Decide what you would build: choose the travelers and the problem you will serve, describe the product and the first version you would launch, and explain why it can succeed against existing travel companies and how you would know it is working.
```hint Avoid the giants' strongest ground
Searching for and booking flights and hotels is dominated by very large companies with big marketing budgets. Look for a painful part of travel those companies are not set up to solve, where a small team can deliver value without first signing deals with airlines or hotels.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Should the product serve leisure travelers, business travelers, or travel companies such as airlines, hotels and tour operators?
- How much funding and runway does the startup have, and is the aim rapid venture-backed growth or early profitability?
- Is there a target country or region, or is the whole world in scope from day one?
- Does "innovative" mean a new capability, such as one made possible by recent AI advances, or a new business model for an existing need?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A map of the travel journey with a reasoned view of where incumbents are strong and where needs go unmet.
- A chosen segment and problem, compared against other candidate ideas using explicit criteria such as pain, frequency, market size, competition and fit for a small team.
- A concrete product with a minimal first version, and what makes it new and hard to copy.
- Business model, distribution and go-to-market for a startup with limited money and staff.
- Success metrics with guardrails, the main risks, and a cheap early test of the idea.
### Follow-up Questions
- Shortly after you launch, a large booking site copies your core feature. How do you respond?
- Your users love the product but need it only once or twice a year. How do you build a lasting business?
- What single experiment would you run in the first month to test the idea before writing much code?
Overview: An open-ended product sense prompt in which you lead a new startup and must decide what innovative software product to build for travel. It tests mapping the traveler journey, spotting needs that large booking companies leave unmet, choosing a segment and problem, scoping a first version, and defining strategy and success metrics.