One app or two: choosing the mobile app structure for a two-sided marketplace
Company: Airbnb
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at a two-sided marketplace: one group of users buys or books, and another group sells or provides. Explain how you would decide whether the buyer and seller experiences should live in one mobile app or ship as two separate apps.
```hint Look at the overlap
Before comparing features, find out how often the same person is on both sides, how new sellers find their way to the marketplace, and what a seller's working day on the app looks like.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What kind of marketplace is it: one where everyday users both buy and sell (resale, home sharing), or one where sellers are businesses or professionals who rarely buy (restaurants, drivers, merchants)?
- Are we choosing for a new product, or considering splitting or merging apps that already have users?
- Where does seller work happen today: on a phone, on a shared tablet at a counter, or on a desktop dashboard, and how quickly must sellers react to a new order or request?
- Are there constraints to respect, such as team size, release capacity or a single brand?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Decision criteria grounded in user overlap, where new supply comes from, and the depth and urgency of seller workflows.
- The experience cost of each option, such as clutter and competing notifications in one app versus install friction and a broken buyer-to-seller path with two.
- Engineering, release and support implications, weighed honestly rather than treated as the deciding factor.
- A conditional recommendation, including hybrid options such as a mode switch or a web dashboard, with a trigger for revisiting it.
- Metrics that would show whether the chosen structure is working.
### Follow-up Questions
- You run one app, and sellers say urgent order alerts get buried among shopping promotions. Do you split the app, and how would you move existing sellers over?
- After a split, how would you detect whether fewer buyers are becoming sellers, and what would you do about it?
- Would your answer change if the supply side were a fleet of couriers with location tracking running all day?
Overview: A marketplace product strategy question about whether buyers and sellers should share one mobile app or get separate apps. It tests how a product manager weighs role overlap, seller workflow depth, supply acquisition, notifications and engineering cost, and turns them into a recommendation with metrics.