Identify and Prioritize the Risks of Running an Online Event Ticketing Platform
Company: Eventbrite
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
An online ticketing system sells tickets to events, delivers them to buyers and validates them at the door. How would you work out the risks that come with running such a system? Explain how you would identify the risks, decide which ones matter most, and keep track of them once the system is live.
```hint Follow one ticket
Trace a single ticket from the moment its event is listed until the event is over and the organizer has been paid. Each step exposes a different party to a different kind of loss.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Whose risks are we assessing: the ticketing platform's, the event organizers' who use it, or the ticket buyers'?
- Is this a self-serve marketplace where any organizer can list an event, or a system run by or for a single venue or promoter?
- Which events and sales are in scope: high-demand on-sales for concerts and sports, small paid community events, free registrations, or online events?
- Does the system handle ticket transfers and resale, or only the first sale?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A structured way to surface risks, such as walking the ticket lifecycle stage by stage and stakeholder by stakeholder, backed by incident, support, fraud and chargeback data.
- Coverage of risks specific to ticketing: scam events and organizer fraud, bots and scalping, payment fraud, on-sale traffic surges and overselling, duplicated or counterfeit tickets, cancellations and refunds, security and privacy, and regulation.
- A prioritization method based on likelihood, impact and how quickly a problem would be detected, ending in a ranked list with owners.
- Mitigations and early-warning metrics for the top risks, with the friction each control adds for honest organizers and buyers.
### Follow-up Questions
- A new organizer with no track record lists a large, high-priced event. Which controls would you apply, and how would you avoid driving away honest new organizers?
- Fans complain that bots bought most of the tickets to a popular show within seconds. How would you confirm what happened, and what would you change?
- How does your risk assessment change for free events or online-only events?
Overview: A product sense question on assessing the risks of an online event ticketing system. It tests whether you can surface risks across the life of a ticket, from scam events, bots and payment fraud to on-sale outages and duplicated tickets, then rank them and choose mitigations and early-warning metrics.