Improving Yelp's tools for local businesses and measuring the impact
Company: Yelp
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Yelp. Most discussion of Yelp focuses on the people who search for places and write reviews; this question is about the other side, the businesses listed on Yelp. How would you improve Yelp for those businesses, and which metrics would you collect to know whether your improvements are working?
```hint Pick one kind of business
A restaurant, a plumber and a dentist get customers through Yelp in very different ways. Choose one business segment and trace how a customer finds it, contacts it and becomes a paying customer before proposing features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which businesses should the improvement target: restaurants, home and local service providers such as plumbers and movers, or another category?
- Is the priority getting more businesses to claim and actively manage their free pages, converting businesses into advertisers, or keeping existing advertisers from leaving?
- Must the improvements stay within Yelp's review rules, for example that businesses cannot ask customers for reviews or pay to change them?
- Should the metrics cover only the features I propose, or the overall health of Yelp's relationship with businesses?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that connects value for businesses with how Yelp earns money from them, without weakening consumers' trust in reviews.
- A segmentation of businesses by category and by stage (unclaimed, claimed and free, advertising) with a reasoned choice of focus.
- Pain points of the chosen segment turned into specific, prioritized improvements.
- A metric set with a primary metric tied to customers the business actually gains, supporting funnel metrics, and guardrails for review integrity and the consumer experience.
- How each metric would be collected and attributed, given that many customer actions such as calls and visits happen off Yelp.
### Follow-up Questions
- Owners ask for a way to remove negative reviews they consider unfair. How do you respond while keeping consumer trust?
- How would you show a restaurant that its advertising brought in diners, when most diners walk in without booking through Yelp?
- Your change raises advertising revenue, but consumer surveys show falling trust in Yelp reviews. What do you do?
Overview: A product improvement question asking how Yelp could better serve the businesses listed on it and which metrics would show progress. It tests segmenting businesses, turning owner pain points into prioritized features that protect review integrity, and defining metrics with guardrails and off-platform attribution.