OpenTable Product Improvement: Pick a Diner or Restaurant Problem and Solve It

You are a product manager at OpenTable, the restaurant reservation platform. How would you make the product better? Decide whom the improvement is for, which problem it solves, and how you would measure whether it worked. ```hint Two sides, one moment OpenTable serves diners who book tables and restaurants that use it to fill them. Pick one side and one moment in the dining journey where things break today, rather than polishing the whole app. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I improve the diner experience in the app and on the website, the tools restaurants use to manage reservations and tables, or is the side my choice? - Is the business goal more diners seated through OpenTable, more restaurants joining, or something else, such as diner loyalty? - Should I stay within booking a table, or can the improvement reach adjacent moments such as discovering a restaurant, joining a waitlist or paying the bill? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal tied to the marketplace and a deliberate choice between diners and restaurants, or a problem that hits both - Pain points grounded in specific moments: searching, finding a restaurant sold out, the days before the meal, arriving - Solutions prioritized by impact, effort and their effect on the restaurants - Success metrics with guardrails, and an experiment design that accounts for diners competing for the same tables - Risks such as no-shows, reservation bots and notification fatigue ### Follow-up Questions - How would your solution change for a small neighborhood restaurant that rarely sells out? - How would you show that your change adds seated diners for restaurants rather than moving bookings they would have received anyway, for example by phone? - How would you stop bots and resellers from exploiting what you build?