Identify and Fix the Most Damaging Customer Pain Point in OpenTable Reservations

OpenTable is the service diners use to find restaurants and book tables, and that restaurants use to run their reservations. Decide which experience you consider the worst one a customer can have with OpenTable, explain why it deserves to be fixed first, and lay out how you would solve it: what causes it, the solutions you would consider, which one you would build first, and how you would know it worked. ```hint Rank failures before choosing Walk a booking from search through the end of the meal, for both the diner and the restaurant, and rank the moments where it can fail by how badly they hurt and how many people they reach. Make the ranking criteria explicit before you pick one. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does "customer" mean the diner making the booking, the restaurant that pays for OpenTable, or should I weigh both? - Should I stay within the core reservation product, or also consider adjacent offerings such as takeout ordering? - Is the aim mainly to keep diners booking through OpenTable, or to protect the restaurant relationships that generate its revenue? - Do bookings made through partner channels, such as a restaurant's own website or a maps listing, count as part of the experience? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A walk through the diner and restaurant journeys that surfaces candidate failures, with stated criteria (severity, reach, who is harmed) for naming the worst one. - Root causes of the chosen failure traced across the app, the restaurant's floor operations and the systems that connect them, with a plan to find which cause dominates. - Solutions that prevent the failure and that recover when it still happens, prioritized into a first version with attention to the effort asked of restaurant staff. - Success metrics that measure how often the failure occurs, plus guardrails for both diners and restaurants. - Risks and trade-offs, such as compensation costs, abuse, and the effect on restaurants as paying partners. ### Follow-up Questions - Your fix asks hosts to do extra work during a busy service. How would you get restaurants to adopt it? - Many diners who are turned away never report it. How would you measure how often it happens? - When the restaurant caused the failure, who should pay to make it right for the diner, OpenTable or the restaurant?