Growth plan to turn unclaimed Yelp listings into owner-managed business pages
Company: Yelp
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
On Yelp, a business page can exist before anyone from the business has taken ownership of it. "Claiming" the page means the owner verifies they run the business and gains control of it. As a product manager at Yelp, how would you get more business owners to claim their pages? Explain which owners you would target, what stops them today, what you would build or change, and how you would know it worked.
```hint Segment the holdouts
Owners skip claiming for different reasons: some have never seen their page, some distrust the platform, and some see no payoff for the effort. Choose the group that matters most before proposing fixes.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is claiming the end goal, or a step toward turning owners into paying advertisers, and which should the plan optimize for?
- Which unclaimed businesses matter most: those with the most consumer views, a particular category such as home services, or certain regions?
- Where do owners drop off today: never starting, failing verification, or abandoning the flow partway through?
- Are there limits on how Yelp may contact owners, for example no cold calls?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Why claimed pages matter to consumers, owners and Yelp, which sets the goal.
- A segmentation of unclaimed owners by awareness, trust and perceived value, with one segment chosen and a reason.
- Solutions aimed at that segment's barriers, prioritized by impact and effort, including a way to show value before asking for the claim.
- Success metrics such as claims weighted by consumer traffic and post-claim activity, plus guardrails on trust and fraudulent claims.
- Risks particular to Yelp, such as owners fearing that claiming leads to sales pressure or affects their reviews.
### Follow-up Questions
- Claims rise after your launch, but most newly claimed pages are never touched again. What do you do?
- How would you stop someone who does not own a business from claiming its page?
- The sales team wants to call every newly claimed business in its first week. How do you respond?
Overview: A product strategy question about persuading more business owners to claim and manage their Yelp pages. It tests segmenting owners by awareness, trust and perceived value, designing interventions that lower friction and build trust, and measuring success with metrics and guardrails that go beyond raw claim counts.