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Airbnb receipt generator for Product Management

[Music] let's say you are one of the most senior pms at airbnb you have to put together a strategy for kovald how are you going to go about doing this okay so just so that we are like on the same page around the scope of the problem so we're talking about airbnb which is like a tourist travel rental platform where there's a marketplace where there are hosts who have like full properties or part of their properties to rent out for people to come and stay and then there is like the guests who are the ones that are renting out the space so that's kind of the overarching business model and from what i understand with the and what i know from the kovid pandemic what has happened to them like in the beginning when the kovitz truck they actually went down with their business quite a bit because people were in panic they completely stopped traveling and kovit was spreading across different countries so they had to even let go of a lot of people in their workforce but after some time say during summer as and people were things were opening up and people were learning more about the the disease itself and the precautions it actually turned around quite differently for them because the airbnb was more of you know a secluded place which was not a hotel and you could actually rent out a place stay by yourself and there was less chance of spreading so that their business actually picked up so that's kind of like from what i understand what has happened so in terms of overarching strategy dealing with covet i'm like my inclination is to go around looking at you know currently with the covet pandemic what are the strengths and weaknesses of the company from where we stand today and then what is like the market landscape looks like and then maybe we can come up with different ideas does that sound good yep that sounds like a good approach okay so then give me like 15 seconds for the coming up with the quick spot analysis on this okay so my i think i'm looking at the overall positioning of the company based on povich and you know the world after covert what it might look like so just as an fyi so looking at the sprints first so i think the company in itself you know has been one of the major strength is that the company has been an established platform this even before pandemic so it's something that people are familiar with they know how to work with this and they have a ecosystem of hosts and guests in many prime locations in the world so that's definitely a plus and with the pandemic i think because you can rent out a whole house and there isn't a lot of interaction with a lot of people like you would have probably in a resort or a hotel and so it sounds more safe to people to travel to a place and you can actually do airbnb i'm not sure if it would apply anyway for anything but like you can there is a lot of for example in california there's a lot of airbnb open up in tahoe so people have opened up their vacation homes for airbnb because people wanted to live and go in a full house and not in a hotel so it just gives them like there are many different opportunities in the sense that you can grow your network based on the situation in the current like pandemic in terms of the weaknesses i think the strengths are also weaknesses because it is a secluded more of like a guest in the host kind of system there could be less confidence in guests in terms of the cleanliness and the hygiene of the place so they might think i'm not sure like how much the host have invested in cleaning the place so the guests could feel where they're going to so they might be unsure or puzzled as well as if so more in control overall by themselves but they also feel that it's not like a hilton hotel that hilton has a certain standard it's really a person's house that they're staying in so that could become an issue even though like airbnb is an established platform but i think people have a certain brand image with the hotels or big resorts versus like even like the airbnb lux might not be that that might not build that confidence in people and then going to opportunities i think there are a lot so given that people do want to go to places where they are owning the whole place by themselves bnb can actually make it more comfortable for people by bringing in more trust by collaborating with you know cleaners or hygiene services or even like go with tests and you know there are multiple opportunities to build that confidence and grow that kind of trend of travel that will probably remain even post pandemic for few years and they can really build up on that and then in terms of threats i think there are a lot more other competitors in the space like big resorts hotels booking.com expedia they're all working towards making sure that people keep going safe so they're already going in and establishing measures and they have a full-fledged staff to do that for their guests on like the resort side or even for travel so i think airbnb is more of a standalone system in that respect so it can lose that battle if they are not careful or if they don't act fast to catch up and make sure that they build that confidence so that's kind of like my understanding of where the landscape is i can come up with two or three main areas in terms of building an overall strategy and then we can discuss where we want to focus on yeah i think you've covered all the major elements yeah which of these would you put sorry pick and put into your strategy give me like 10 seconds on on that okay so i have like three main areas that i think that could be interesting to or like can have a lot of potential in building the next phase of airbnb overall strategy for travel so the first one is more around building more confidence in the hosts so it could be like a covered host verification type of solution where airbnb can invest in a team or a you know business unit that actually takes care of certain measures and make sure that this host is doing things or maintaining a certain level of cleanliness and sanitization and everything to make sure to make the site cover it safe so that would build confidence in gas that will stay there that you know this has been over safe certified and i can stay there i can expect a certain level of you know cleanliness and so that can take away some sort of worry the second one is more around building a system of you know going one step further and giving people more information around how many covet cases have been in this area so there are like multiple companies like apple and even facebook are coming up with covet graphs so you can actually you know you can actually volunteer to be cracked and then it can have a tracking of covet graph and what has been how many people with covet has been visiting in this area how safe it is to visit overall caribbean we can provide that information to people trying wanting to visit a particular tourist site and that can build up confidence that you know maybe this this place or this particular location doesn't have a lot of coverage and the third area is even like as things starts uh opening up and normal lives when people want to go back to their normal life one of the things that might still need a lot more push is like air travel because locally people can get into their cars and book sites and still okay but the the international airbnb business still needs to take up so i think for that they can airbnb can collaborate with airlines and medical staff or medical institutions and as well as governments to make sure that tourism is still safe and people who are coming in are properly tested airbnb can bring up that information on its platform so people who are uh and traveling or feeling more safe so that's the third part of the overall like strategy and i think it's a bit like sequential in certain way respect but i would love to like know like where you would you want me to focus on yeah that was actually going to be my next question like if you had to put these one after another how would you prioritize between these yeah i think the priority order i think one and two need to happen almost in parallel and i would say one is a little more important than maybe two because there is a certain segment of users who want to travel you know locally or interstate and they are okay but they have this reluctance of i don't know where i'm staying in so the host verification and some measures of covet safety verification stamped by airbnb or maybe some other organization that people can trust can build that confidence and get those people in back to traveling again but with the numbers going up again and people are have a lot more questions around the vaccine so the covet safety program or overtracking will also probably be a quick follow-up or just happen like almost in battle the third one can actually be like a little bit later once you know things start opening up within different countries more than air travel could be the next step understood let's explore the first one then let's say you've been tasked with executing on uh building together this host verification or certification mechanism that we're going to show up there and as the pm now of that team what are you going to do how are you going to execute on this okay okay give me like one like one minute or so to kind of collect my thoughts on this yeah okay so i can actually start and then maybe i can take a little bit more pause to it when i work through the solution but i think the way i would approach this is that i'll talk about first you know like given that the scope is bring building an overall host verification system for in terms of coverage measures i will first talk about the users or like people who are uh be using this product who are part of the ecosystem and then i'll talk about their specific needs their functional as well as their emotional needs and then we can talk about solutions in that area of like few couple of solutions or more and then we can prioritize solutions based on their investment to impact ratio yep sounds good okay so starting with the users i think they're two different like two sides of this marketplace one is the hosts actually like three one is the host that is putting up their property for rental offer to and tourism and then the second is the guests who are booking the property and third is like really the airbnb like as part of as platform providing these facilities so for the purpose of this i will focus on you know like host and guest and then come up with a solution that address their needs all right so cool so going into the needs like first let's talk about the needs for the guests so talking about their like functional needs they you know they need a place to stay when they visit a new city needs to be like you know meet certain standards be a good place and then now i'm taking it a little like i think basic amenities that they would expect to go to any other place should be there and taking it to the next level of like emotional as well as like over needs in the pandemic i would say that they want to like the first thing that comes to mind is like safety they want to make sure that they are not exposing themselves to extra risk by traveling at this time so they want to know some way that they are going to a clean place and hasn't been exposed to virus in the last few like weeks or something and then another thing that they want is like say somebody still you know falls like like what are the medical supports and measures that they can get in case you know something happens like is there a plan that i can be still taken care of what if i get stuck there what if i actually like somehow contract the wires and i'm stuck there what happens then and the another thing is like in terms of like cancellations and say you know i'm booking this say two weeks ahead and then i'm i certainly don't want to do this or say something come up because of the changing situation numbers change can i still go ahead and cancel it and get my money back so i think base these are like the primary needs that come to mind in terms of like need for the guests i think the first thing that they want to uh also make sure is they are like getting business so airbnb some guests do it as a part-time for their like vacation homes they rent it out so it's not a primary source of income some of them actually invest in it as you know real like full-time business and they they really need this money to sustain their business so they do want to get in guests so they want to make sure they're they're able to run their business so that's one and then the second thing is they want to make sure the guests were coming in like very basic functional needs are respecting their property staying well also not and you know taking to the next level of emotional or you know side of means that they also don't want the people who are coming in to do not take precautions say they have it they don't want them to travel and stay in their property or if the somebody who's eligible to take the vaccine they want to make sure they have already been vaccinated like at least for the short term until like everybody is so what are some of the like basic needs that come to mind given the state of things in the pandemic so i can come up with a couple of options or solutions in the next 30 seconds to see what we can do around this yeah let's focus on the guest side only within the guest side let's say we're going to pick some of these ideas and build them into a certification system how would you go around doing that now okay let me think about that yeah okay so i have three ideas that we can go with in terms of like product solutions so the first one is you know somewhat basic in terms of like it will give the basic information to users say yeah for example say i'm a user who wants to book an airbnb site for staying in lake tahoe and in terms of like certifications building a guest certification system airbnb can have a team focused on making sure that while i'm booking i'm able to see like how many covet cases have been there in that zip code in the last two weeks so i'm able to track the you know like the overall penetration like overall prevalence of the virus in that particular area yeah the second thing that uh can happen is like airbnb would have a special team for each all the hosts that are certified to make sure they are following a certain level of screenless measures and there can be tears within that like tier one is like everybody has to qualify to make sure they are like meeting the basic needs of cleanliness and like a disinfection but there could be like multiple tiers like the basic chairs is making sure the whole place is clean and properly after somebody leaves and everything is new so there is like no issues there so there could be like multi like it can come collaborate with different services who have been helping with medical you know supplies and stuff to make sure that there is some sort of like brand name that helps airbnb that this is a good certification the second tier could be more around like going to the next level so the everything is clean but then this host is also having you know disinfectants in every room that you stay seen or i think they have this infrared or some sort of like other like grey machines that kills the virus so they have the whole place equipped with that so that gives like it's a next level of precaution and the basic level of knowledge include everybody will have the ability to get masks and sanitizers everywhere so i think the the basic the first idea is like you get the information of what's the prevalence of virus as well as for every host that you show in on your platform has a basic certification and if they do i would go with like we don't even get the host who don't have that certification at this point because that would really impact the confidence and we don't want people to take risk even if they want to take the risk they're open to we don't want it and then the third thing is like different tiers like tier one is basic everything is good and the tier two or three is like even to the next level so that's one idea the second one is actually going bringing in some sort of like virtual tour to the airbnb platform so i can actually tour the like i can use some sort of air vr and i can actually see what it would be like when i'm there what does the facility feel like and everything so it will do two things one it will build more confidence or like just from an experienced standpoint it will also like excite the tourists and users to come and travel more because they will get the feel of it they will feel it more uh realistically and they may want to like that hump of not traveling might they may be able to overcome that so the second idea has everything that the first has but it also has the capability of virtual tours the third one is more around adding like a medical assistant like in every host site that people go in like it could be any smart device like a speaker like alexa or a portal where you know it's connected to the medical facilities in that area so you can talk about what you like if you don't feel good you can talk about what do i do with this what can i get how can i get this and the system will answer based on the that particular area and get people what they need because it could feel very secluded given that things are still opening up so if they have something at their fingertips and they can find things easily it will build more confidence because with airbnb so good ideas all of them let's go with the certification one where we are providing additional information about the site to the guest how are you going to get like i want to discuss two components here the first is what is it going to look like in the user interface you refer to tiers and the like and that's great but maybe flesh out a rudimentary design to show where and what information you'd show in your mvp and the second is how would you actually execute on this how would you gather this data at a property level okay give me like few seconds to think through this okay so i think in terms of like the experience because this is a new concept so i have like very rough like uh diagram over here the user first come in so say we enable this feature we will actually have first time experience around forward certification which will walk people through like what it means what we have done and how what kind of information like they can get for a site that is covered certified for tier one tier two tier three and in terms of like how it will show up say i'm searching for rentals in tahoe again and then in front of like every rental we will have like a icon that will say tier one forward certification here three covered certification so the users have some context on what it is and then they can see like what level of certification it has received and also for when they click into the overt certification it can also tell them about what that means so that would be a basic experience i'll put together in the platform and then in terms of like how i will get the data the first thing that i will query or like try to make sure that we are able to collaborate is the public records of the medical institutions in that area would tell us like how many active cases have been reported the second area we can go after is like i know apple and facebook have these voluntary overtrackers so you can register your phone number and it can crack like where you have been and what was the exposure in that area so like to get to the next level you can see how many people have visited and people like with a certain phone number have visited that area how much exposure they had so that can come up with the overall score of covet exposure so those could be the starting ideas and then we can fine tune as we make it more smarter all right got it so let's say this is how we're going to execute on it tying this back to our original strategy this is the first leg of your strategy where you're providing guests with the reassurance they need to be able to book it how are you going to measure if your strategy is working okay so that's a great question few more seconds here to think through the key metrics or success metrics here a couple of like obvious things that we could look at is that the number of bookings or registrations for from guests before and after in the area say we rolled it out in united states or certain key cities in the united states what is the delta in the number of bookings before and after we had this so if that goes up that would tell us another thing we could look at is the reviews of say people who actually came in and state what are they saying about the service and the overall like this new feature and like one other thing would be users who have saved or use this once say maybe not if before coverage a person who books an airbnb re books another airbnb in say next three months so we can look at that life cycle like has that life cycle restored itself that i booked once now i'm comfortable am i booking again in that same amount of time or has it uh helped in bringing back the same business like flywheel and those could be some like key metrics and quantitative and qualitative you could look at all right fair enough let's say you have to very quickly summarize this particular part of your strategy just the part around providing this information for guests to provide them reassurance to say your manager in just two or three sentences and take a minute to think about it in just two or three sentences how would you summarize this piece of your strategy to your manager okay so just to so that i understand i'm summarizing the overall like this whole solution that we came up with only this solution yes primarily the solution yeah okay give me a minute to come up with this with the summary so here like the the two or three sentences i would like say around this is to build confidence in our guests with the ongoing pandemic on around travel and using airbnb as a booking platform we are rolling out a covert certification program this program certifies like requires all the hosts on our platform to follow basic coverage safety practices which we will inform our guests around and we will have to ensure that to give more preference to hosts and guests who want to invest more in providing safety for povet we will also build tiers starting from basic tier to like more advanced tiers so our guests and who's can have multiple options to work with around this overarching goal and strategy all right cool got it i'll go through the feedback like i usually do in a nutshell so let's start from the top let's start from the strategy piece so the good stuff is you start with a good way for fleshing out the different actors in the different the landscape you're operating in and you didn't first time you just have straight into the swot analysis and you had a pretty thorough swot analysis my only constructive would be even in a question like this it could be useful to ask certain clarifying questions which is like if there is a strategy you've been asked to put together is there a certain goal behind the strategy like are we trying to could be taking huge losses so are we looking to suddenly like increase our profitability are we looking to maybe use this as an opportunity to craft market share because a lot of other actors might be struggling are we using it as an opportunity to try out new ideas because customer preferences have changed so dramatically so say virtual is in suddenly there could be different goals your interviewer could have some of those in mind so that's worth clarifying and also to make your life easier is there like a geographical scope are we just going to talk about the us or is there a focus like business travelers or professional properties or is there a temporal element even like are we coming up with the long-term strategy or the short immediate strategy or do you want me to cover everything because that just makes it easier for you to concentrate on one thing so for instance if i said here we're just going to focus on the image or term how do we react to the chaos then you wouldn't would you then you necessarily focus your ideas in just that whereas if i'd say here we're looking at the long term like five year horizon then you necessarily look at hey what are the big bets we could take at this time given the change customer preferences right so that could help you gain some focus for the rest of the interview the swot analysis was really well done not much feedback there i did think it was slightly detailed and that's totally okay some people might cut you off at a point then it could be useful to like maybe and this is nitpicky constructive to like lead with an overall introduction to the swot analysis just to give an idea of what you're going to do so like for instance the entire market landscape has changed customers want safety hosts are desperate for revenue because nobody's booking stuff everyone's gotten got a certain risk aversion that underpins all decisions and there's regulatory rules changing every day so this leads to a lot of our core strengths there are some things that we are weak in there are opportunities and then there are the chests where we don't yet know what we're going to do we like kind of frame the rest of your ideas within the weaknesses section i thought you had good weaknesses but i also had an opportunity there to whatsoever like uh flag those and really easy words so that they become memorable so you flesh them out by describing the actual problem like that properties are secluded guests and home systems there's less confidence people are left unsure and also just like flag them with the biggest weakness right now is that customers don't have trust and in the fact that these are non-professional properties and customers don't have that reliability because they feel out of control like it's not standardized experience like hilton and you didn't do this for the other ones for instance you didn't do this some of the other that you flashed out then we came to the strategy itself this is the part where i thought you did pretty well like you had good ideas on how what elements you'd include into this strategy and then you later talk about how you put this into a time horizon my only feedback here is it could be useful to mention the time horizons the sequence of those before the ideas because then it looks like you've already got the plan in your head and now you're putting things in rather than coming up with the ideas and then putting them into a plan so typically something like my strategy is going to cover three-time horizon like the short-term midterm and long term in the short term i'm going to rebuild trust and confidence by providing certifications and providing more context and what the situation on the ground is like and in the mid and long term i'm going to start coming up with collaborations with airlines and the like so that is secure because those will need to also recover if we are to recover and then again that sounds like you've got the overall strategy in place rather than picking a bunch of ideas and schwarning them into a strategy because it was clear you had it it's just about how you frame it all right the after this you went into the actual product design and you fleshed out what customers look for etc i thought you did a good job of fleshing this out there was great content in there at one point however it seemed like the content was disconnected from the remit so we were talking about kobit right as an underlying base you start talking about customers needs in terms of having a place to stay that we say standards have basic amenities before moving into the covered part so if you're going to do that that's fine that's actually useful exercise to do but i'd recommend like bucketing it and saying under normal circumstances people who typically care about having a good place to stay which meets their standards has the basics of yes this is completely been overwhelmed by all these security and like risks related to covet that have cropped up so now people care just as much as like the health and hygiene factors have been potentially been exposed to the virus and that's the new evolution and what customers look for that we really need to target properly in our short term strategies then you came up with a list of ideas on what people could check that was completely adequate i just had like some others that i was also thinking alongside some things you said triggered ideas in my head so i'm going to list them out right now but to be clear that it's not a prerequisite but some ideas that for instance people might have some questions about what guests might have like does this property have it is like is the sanitizer present it's an airbnb property so can i get the key without meeting someone like the gap between the previous guesting and me saying are there volcanoes who might have been exposed so these are good questions that people have right now which could then be built into any kind of certification system i also thought you did a good job covering what the host is looking for like forward test is a person algebra for vaccine and we then moved into the solution where you came up with the three ideas i thought all three had good potential to be honest i just wanted to go into the specific direction of the certification because i thought there's an opportunity to flesh out the design and metrics for this i thought you did a good job so there's different ways of doing it i like the fact that you might get cleared so that people have like a one-word answer like basic advanced what your the property is in there could be a lot more questions their interviewers would uh follow down here we're asking okay what if someone doesn't execute on it from the platform with the impact of that it says the entire host side exploration could have been done if i had asked it but we didn't so there's no need to worry about that but you came up with a good user flow so these were things where you were very strong in so the ideas the picking the flashing out of what the experience will be like extremely well done like merging it with apple and facebook i did kind of throw a trap question basically how are you going to get this data so that's something to watch out for again this is pure constructive it wasn't a prerequisite in this answer but one way of getting the data could be from hosts themselves like this is what all the people have done so far like just ask the host are you doing this are you doing this are you doing this and tell them that hey if you commit to doing something and a guest report said you haven't actually done it then you give me a tv and then you suddenly got an at scale all properties just get a form saying we know you're probably taking extra precautions just take a list of here's what we think you might have done and if you've done something extra then just make that an evolving list which keeps growing based on what people have actually said they have done and then build a rating system or certification system around that basics are quite clean and super high whatever doing so that's just one additional execution idea which in which you could hack things but again that wasn't unnecessary because you actually did have good ideas around code cases recordings one which are also good metrics so in matrix you talked about three metrics so i'd ask you a question how will you measure if your strategy is working right you turn this into metrics and that's fine but it's also worth being aware that that's not there is to the strategies you need to ultimately first articulate like what the goal of this piece of strategy is and then see if it ties into that particular goal the second piece of field right here is that it doesn't necessarily have to be just quantitative metrics you can have both qualitative quantitative metrics right so qualitative for instance could just be like going around our people survey questions like do people find this content useful or not and then there's the quantitative which is do we see an improvement in our metrics now all the metrics you picked you you gave three which was the tetan bookings are the reviews of people who stayed and how frequently they come back all right these are good metrics but these are also at least the latter two are lacking metrics which means they happen quite a bit after the fact but there are a lot of leading metrics you could also articulate which is engagement behavioral signals on like are people reading this content are people scrolling and like hovering over that certification to see what it's about to find out even at an earlier stage how people actually use finding this useful like add a filter does this property have extra hygiene precautions do people use that it could even be a tour then you just take that checkbox and say hey we are gathering this information to already test would your customers find this information useful in the shape or form that you are gathering dating all right so as a pm it's important that you not build the entire thing and then test it's important to make it into like a smaller step possible to get a signal and this is all about like in your strategy the way you explained it you'd already have invested quite a bit of effort before you found out if it's working or not so that's some feedback i had there i thought your summary was good the only part there is to also add the metrics in because if you have the if you you explain the strategy or you will explain the product very succinctly but it's important to conclude with saying we will know if we are being successful if we see bookings go up in the market that we're testing this with and then we figure out how we scale it up to other markets or we would know we are being successful if you see people engaging with this content we need to improve the quality of our content and scale this up additional markets and stuff like that sorry so that is all from my side in a nutshell do you have any questions i could answer quite frankly no i think uh like it's really great feedback like you have a lot of like good points i was taking notes i did like the the leading versus lagging metrics i think that's that's a very good like very insightful as i think about like what are my success metrics here so yeah i think like i all of your feedback makes a lot of sense so i was just taking notes i really appreciate this so i'm not i don't really have questions i think most of it sounds good best of luck yeah thanks thanks for watching the video if you liked it please subscribe our website is prepfully.com we've got lots of interview questions there you can 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