Airbnb Product Manager Mock Interview: Increase Airbnb Bookings

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Its nice to see that even real world product managers are never sure of their answers when interviewing

Remember to use the word ‘awesome’ in your PM interview and you’ll do just fine.

Love this interview. interviewer is just blunt and straight forward, which is how normally it is. I like how the interviewee asked these questions and in parellel was thinking about the solutions.

Loved how poised the interviewee was throughout and how neatly he structured every step of his thought process. 16:30 - especially liked the notion of changing the interaction model for low intent travelers. It reminded me of how I recently visited Barcelona and, wanting to venture off the beaten path and out of the city for a few days, used Airbnb to discover beautiful homes / experiences along Costa Brava without a specific city in mind. Was initially undecided if I would even do this (low intent) and even if i did, undecided between hotel vs Airbnb (medium intent?), but I ultimately curated my trip around the Airbnb I found in a small beach town - one that I wouldn’t have known to search for had I not found the listing. But not everyone gets as creative as me :P so bringing that kind of travel discovery and inspiration more front and center to increase engagement with leisure travelers is a fun idea. Thanks for sharing this great interview!

I could feel that tension during the halfway then I was picturing myself as part of this. This is definitely a good study material as you can see how a PM structures the strategy and approaches down

AirBnB can increase bookings by many ways like : Are we looking to increase bookings by expansion to new cities? Are we looking for new users? Are we looking for repeat users? Are we looking for churned users? Are we looking to double tap on cart abandoned users? Probably the last user segment will give some quick wins for getting more bookings, as its difficult to get users on ToFu and then get them to complete funnel

This is a great interview example, very relatable reasoning by the Product Manager, as someone who has practiced mock interviews a lot

Absolutely loved the Pinterest idea for travel and bookings.

Excellent interview - great back and forth dialogue

This was a great strategy question, here are some of the things I really liked from Phil's answers: 1. Revisiting the core mission and ethos of Airbnb before arriving at a North-Star metric or a solution. Thus keeping things in perspective. 2. Being flexible and open to feedback that the north star metric he arrived at might not be accurate. ( @06:48 Going from Annual bookings per user per year to the Number of nights per user per year) 3. Stating the different kinds of user segmentation and why he chose to work with Leisure and low-intent travelers. (This is important as it shows that there might be instances on the job where one has to work within certain constraints, here it was not having access to the data team.) 4. Potential Features: Scoping further might give the answer to the jobs-to-be-done framework. 5. A simple go-to-market strategy that targets inactive users: Teasing the idea of the Explore/Browsing section of the application, measuring the engagement of the newsletter, and so on.

Really nice framework on how to handle such Questions. Thanks!

The most honest interview ever seen :)

This guy's good. I like his constructive and highly engaging way to comminucate.

Started off well, really liked that he explained his thought process with steps. I think there was a miss in not spending enough time on the conversion funnel (Acquire, Engage, Monetize), and the user journey. Moderator did a good job with challenging assumptions and the PM was calm and composed.

This was great and I really appreciate this video!

I jumped to this from eng sys design interviews in a playlist so as I was working on something and listening, I thought, "man he's spending so much time talking about managerial details". Then I looked at this screen and saw "product manager". Ok, that makes sense.

User expansion. Majority of the users are concerned of the safety in apartments/bungalows. It would be good to have conversations enabled on the airbnb app on the reviews posted by previous customers. This increases user engagement with the app. This user induced conversation acts as hook to visit the app.

Mhaan!! the guy had a sigh of relief when the interview ended. Seems like this is a pressure test interview and put him right on spot. I don't know if I will be able to handle so much for almost 5 rounds.

This is very helpful. Thank you so much.