TripAdvisor Product Improvement: Choosing a Traveler Segment and Prioritizing Fixes
Company: Expedia
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
How would you make TripAdvisor better? It is the travel site and app where people read and write reviews of hotels, restaurants and attractions and compare hotel prices before they book.
Pick the users and the part of the product you would focus on, identify their most important problems, propose improvements, decide what to build first, and explain how you would measure whether it worked.
```hint Follow one trip
Trace a traveler from the first idea for a trip through booking and the trip itself. Notice the moments where they leave TripAdvisor for a search engine, a booking site or a maps app, and ask what they could not get on TripAdvisor.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the goal more engagement, more reviews contributed, or more revenue from sending travelers to booking partners?
- Should the improvement serve travelers, the people who write reviews, or the hotels, restaurants and booking sites listed on TripAdvisor?
- Which surface and stage of travel: planning on the web before booking, or the mobile app during the trip?
- Are any product areas out of scope, such as restaurant reservations or tours and activities?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- An understanding of TripAdvisor's mission and how it makes money, and a goal for the improvement that serves both users and the business
- A justified choice of one user segment and one moment in the trip, given the many groups the product serves
- Specific pain points for that segment, grounded in why travelers leave for other tools
- Several improvements ranked by impact and effort, with a clear first version and its trade-offs, including effects on review trust and on booking partners
- Success metrics with guardrails, and a plan to test the changes
### Follow-up Questions
- Your improvement helps travelers decide faster but lowers the number of clicks sent to booking partners. Would you ship it?
- How would you keep reviews trustworthy as fake and incentivized reviews become easier to produce?
- More travelers now ask search engines and AI assistants where to stay and what to do. How does that change what you would prioritize?
Overview: A product sense question asking how you would improve TripAdvisor, the travel review and hotel price comparison site and app. It tests picking a traveler segment and trip stage, finding real pain points, prioritizing improvements against how the business earns money, and defining success metrics with guardrails.