Raising Review Coverage, Usefulness and Trust for Wayfair's Furniture Catalog
Company: Wayfair
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Wayfair, the online retailer of furniture and home goods. How would you improve the customer reviews and ratings shown on its product pages? Explain what "improve" should mean here, which customers and problems you would focus on, what you would build first, and how you would know it worked.
```hint Decide what "better reviews" means
More reviews, more useful reviews and higher star ratings are different goals with different fixes, and the last depends partly on the products and deliveries themselves. Think about what makes reviewing a sofa or a bed frame different from reviewing a book or a phone case.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Should improvement mean more reviews per product, more useful and trustworthy reviews, or a higher average rating?
- Which business outcome matters most: purchase conversion, fewer returns, or shoppers' trust in the site?
- Should I cover the whole catalog, or focus on large, expensive items such as sofas and mattresses?
- Are there limits on rewarding customers for reviews, or on involving suppliers in collecting them?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear definition of the goal, tied to how shoppers rely on reviews when buying furniture and home goods online
- Segments of review readers and review writers, with pain points specific to bulky, assembled, high-consideration items
- Prioritized solutions across collecting reviews, their quality and display, and the root causes behind low ratings
- Success metrics with guardrails for authenticity and rating inflation
- Risks and trade-offs, including how incentives or moderation could distort ratings and erode trust
### Follow-up Questions
- Many one-star reviews turn out to be about damaged deliveries rather than the products. How would you handle them?
- A newly listed product has no reviews. How do you help shoppers decide in the meantime?
- How would you check that a rise in average rating reflects better products rather than a skewed group of reviewers?
Overview: A product improvement question asking how a product manager would make customer reviews and ratings more useful at Wayfair, an online furniture and home goods retailer. It tests defining the goal, understanding review readers and writers for bulky purchases, prioritizing fixes and choosing metrics with trust guardrails.