Meta/Facebook Product Sense MOCK Interview

Imagine yourself you're a product manager and we will want to build something in the travel space what product would you build hey guys so today we have Abhishek again for product sense because you all asked for him again so for those who haven't met him in the last video go check that out but he'll give a short intro today and we're gonna dive into a product sense ma question today hey Dan thanks for inviting me hey everyone this is Abhishek I work as lead product manager at Square where I'm responsible for the online ordering and

delivering for the e-commerce platform for square prior to joining Square I was at PayPal for nine years working as senior product manager there I'm so excited to be here it's so good to have you again and we're gonna have some fun today and we're going to be talking about traveling so let's Dive Right In so we're going to cover a product sense question today which is one of the main questions that you'll be asked or product design at the Facebook Google of the world so Abhishek today imagine yourself you're a product Manager and we will

want to build something in the travel space and let's put Facebook aside entirely um and just imagine that you're a startup what product would you build hmm awesome mixes um and then just a few clarifying question then um are there any resourcing any funding any geographical constraint that I should keep in mind or I'm free to explore them you're free to explore the world is your oyster awesome that makes sense what I'm going to do now is I'll share my screen um so you can trace my thoughts and we can have a more uh informed

decision and discussion awesome since this is a pretty broad open-ended question and travel space itself is big I would love to first start with why like why do we really want to enter into this space if it really makes sense to enter into travel space in such a time looking at the macroeconomic conditions and the competitors Etc then we would look into the travel value chain generally I don't discuss value chains go straight into the user and problem but because travel is such an open space it's a pretty broad area let's look at the value

chain of travel and see if we can find a specific niche in which we want To operate or just want to take travel in general would love to establish the mission of a product business school and then I would like to cover Target users who other users will be focusing on look at the user Journey look into their problems and then dive straight into the solutions um if we have time again I don't think so we might but if we have time I can also talk about some GTM because it's a totally brand new product

we'll maybe talk about some go to market strategies if we have time but low price yeah awesome makes hey Dan let's quickly talk about the why um so if I were to enter the travel space I think the first thing I generally look whenever I'm entering into a totally new product space is the total addressable market like is this problem or is the space big enough uh I don't have full stats on me but then travel we can intuitively tell is a very big space it's a billion dollar industry in itself other factor to look

at when entering a new space is not just a tab but also the growth while the target market may be big but is it shrinking or is it growing while travel had its own blips due to covet and it paused for a while but we See from the news that travel is picking back up uh travel solves a very inherent human need that they really want to explore the world spend their free time uh and I don't see a reason why travel would shrink unless we have any big disasters like say covert or anything else

I think travel industry on a whole will keep on growing the macro conditions were not viable if I were to start this maybe a year ago I would have double thoughts but as pandemic is easing economies opening flights are back on people are traveling again I think macroeconomic conditions are good enough there are a bunch of competitors in this space who are solving for travel but I would like to explore them deeply in the value chain because most of these competitors act at different level of travel and then I would see like if there's any

unserved Niche here in the value chain that we can Target actually so let me drive straight into the value chain basically so if you look at the full value chain for travel I think it starts with Discovery so the first thing is hey I have to discover where I'm going to travel it can be totally intuitive or I'm looking out for Inspiration and players acting in this field of Discovery insta which has become very popular with a lot of their travel content and travel influences coming in FP sites like clip advisor or maybe even local

magazines that I may subscribed to that can act as a Discovery Channel for me that hey what are some of the places I would love to go to the first point in the decision and then basically Comes The Journey part I have to plan my journey I have to do the booking Expedia take a flight websites like United or trip actions app a lot in this space then comes the stay part that there are players who are optimizing your stay like stay batters stay with locals Etc Airbnb booking.com local hotels act in this space and

then the core part comes in around your itinerary and local experiences what would exactly you do when you reach the destination what are some of the activities that you do so there are tour guides there are some local players uh there are some very Niche players in this space I remember going to Hawaii and when I was trying to go to road to Hana I found an app called Shaka guide that is just responsible for telling me What are the different spots at road to Hana so it builds out a full itinerary of road to

Hana but it was very Niche and very local I'm again it may be I would do more research when I'm actually building the space but I would love to see are there any other players so far my assumption is I haven't found any strong player that can help you with local experiences in itinerary Airbnb is trying to do that but it has very limited uh activities and it doesn't build your full artery it's very disjointed experience that will tell you one or two activities that you can do in isolation and then finally it has it

is a trend now it was a few years ago or 10 years ago is once you travel have you even traveled if you haven't really shared your travel memories and photographs so people tend to come back and share it with their friends families fpns start doing a lot in that space uh and they are the clear winner I think at one point Flickr was very popular where people used to share a lot of images uh when I look at this value chain I look at this competitors I you know very intuitively I can see this

area is right now underserved there are not a lot of competitors It's also an area which is the core part of traveling unless you really want to just go and relax at a resort for five six days which is again maybe a small population I think this still becomes the core part of travel traveling your itinerary what exactly are the things you're going to do there maybe three days or a week when you're staying there and what are some of the good interesting local experiences that you would go and uh experience there um yeah please

go ahead the Airbnb because they have their Airbnb experiences and you mentioned there's not like that many that much Supply can you extrapolate a bit on that yeah let me talk about that so if you see Airbnb uh it provides stay and I think Airbnb really found a gap in the market nobody's really doing well so maybe that's why they enter into that but the way they provide you experience is say I'm going to Portland I can find what are the different experiences in Portland maybe an archery class a cooking class Etc but what Airbnb

fails to still do that is build out my good itinery a good plan you are here for three days these are all the activities that you can do in three days What it provides are a couple of experiences here and there and I won't say the list is exhaustive the list is pretty small the list is also dependent on the service providers that are on their platform that they have signed up with so it's a good experience it's not a great experience it's still disjointed in my opinion and there's still a lot that can be

done here compared to other parts like you know flight booking you have you have flight bookings you have Journey booking app I can basically build out something that can optimize for cost and saving but those might be small Improvement it will not be a big jump these are small improvisation whereas this is the area where I see we can have a leap in terms of what we can innovate and what we can build interesting yeah no this sounds fun definitely like you said local experiences is what makes or break the experience yeah good and I

also feel this is a good entry into the market because other places as we see is already crowded I think if you're into if you enter here well and if you're able to win the market it's very easy to go on the adjacencies like not only I build your local experience I'll Also find your way to stay there but I also find your way to reach there so I I think based on what we have seen so far this makes the best sense to enter the market with okay cool all right now that we have

determined that this is the area we'll be entering in rest of my journey finding users problems in solution will be restricted into this very Niche okay that will be going in all right I think before even we go there let's do a mission I love to do this exercise before building out any new product it just helps to inspire the team Inspire everyone and bring them on the same page I also believe mission is something that transcends more than you or just your product like it's it's a bigger higher calling that you should take care

of and I generally spend a lot of time writing Mission but I'll try to do best making it quickly um give me a minute to think about the good mission okay not the best mission statement but some of the few wordings I wanted to focus on was beautiful memories I guess your local experience either part of the journey that you remember the most like if you ask me I may not remember my Delta flight from San Jose to New York But I would always remember the things I saw in New York um and because we

want to show local experiences something unique I probably wanted to add something more about a unique lens and unique perspective there's a way you travel like a tourist you go there go to all the touristy spot but maybe there are activities where you go to a local pub you understand the history why it was built get to meet local people talk to them experience and understand their culture so if I were to write my mission it would focus on these key pillars making beautiful memories because this is the part of Journey that you always remember

seeing a local World understanding the uniqueness so probably this is somewhere roughly where my mission would be that would Inspire my team and my people to build experience that Delights user that makes them happy and that makes Everlasting long beautiful memories [Music] um a unique lens is that supposedly pointing to the local lens that's yeah that's that's basically pointing to some local experiences and local lens that are not that common commonly known okay nice since I'm early in the stage I would focus a Lot more on adoption as my business goal finding a product Market

fit and would not like to focus on revenue and I can quickly define adoption is basically one experience booked on the platform I'll probably keep it to one because uh travel may not be a daily thing or maybe a weekly thing may not be even a monthly ticket maybe a bi-monthly thing so probably someone is booking one experience of the platform I can say that they might have adopted the platform and you have to go through the full journey of experiencing so that's my business goal focusing on adoption not on Revenue because we are early

in the cycle and want to look at product Market fit I wanted to make sure Diana if we are okay with the business school and you're on the same page and if it makes sense yeah so one experience booked on the platform across the time period like if we were to get our data science to measure this yeah yeah that makes sense I think a good point um I think I would just basically since I'm starting out I will just look at maybe a monthly yeah maybe I'll look at them more like a monthly number

like double track and again this Is more of a full North Star and goal setting exercises I would not Define my North Star here I'm just taking more from a business perspective I would look at overall adoption numbers on a monthly basis how many experiences that have been booked and delivered to our users okay sounds good awesome let's go and quickly move into our Target users so for my target users I will basically start with broad category and then I'll just go and start narrow down all right um I'm basically dividing it into two parts

uh one other service provider in the travel industry so if I'm talking about my niche of local experiences and iteries there are players who are service providers who provide service and then they'll basically be the consumers or The Travelers so let me look into Travelers and then we'll just think about who do we want to prioritize and who do we want to focus for okay on the traveler side you know there are many lenses on which I can slice and dice this whole traveler thing um Let me let me start with this you know like

a more common one um generally we try to keep our Target segment as me see mutually exclusive And comprehensive uh on the first look it might look hey friends has also grew families also a group but one thing to keep in mind is they are still different because with family you may have a recurring theme like I may be traveling with the same set of people when I'm traveling with family or largely same set of people I know that habit and preference slightly more and better whereas in friends in a group this is not this

is a dynamic group my friends can keep changing so that may determine what type of solution I'll be building in and also my tolerance for Comfort my appetite for exploration might be very different in a family versus friends income and solo travelers all together a different class of users okay it's a good point now I think my first set of questions would be hey do I want to build something for service provider or do I want to build something for travelers right and that's a very typical Marketplace problem do you focus on seller first or

do you focus on buyer first um I think in this case basically um would love to focus more on The Travelers because that will be the core USB of our platform if I'm able to provide a good experience To my Travelers service providers will very easily come service providers basically look for Avenues where they can get more business and if my certain app has more value for travelers and they keep coming in I think it'll be great value for service provider also to solve the chicken egg problem you can always precede service providers like you

can take the listing from Craigslist or from other websites other places you can easily reach out the effort to be on the platform is much lower for service provider compared to the traveler like why would I book something from here also uh yeah basically so by basically going back to the core Marketplace principle focusing on where the end value lies the end value lies with The Travelers that's in the interest for service provider interest for our platform so we would love to focus on Travelers first not saying I ignore service provider but we would want

to start to build the best experience for travelers okay now yeah any questions so far no no all right then basically within Travelers I think I would like to go further down because maybe when I'm starting I would like to focus more So between family Solo Traveler and friends and group I would probably try to look at maybe say uh my major deciding factor if I were to do a weighted average my major deciding factor will be reach and frequency of use because our focus is more on adoption I will keep arpu more as a

tiebreaker in the sense because I don't want to go for a market where even in the future I may not receive a lot of Revenue so if certain certain segment has a good Revenue potential that's the niche where I would want to grow test and validate and see a product Market fit so I would do a very quick t-shirt sizing I'm not doing weighted average for the time and simplicity but in reality we actually go with weighted averages look at more quantitative research in the market so starting with family um the reach is large frequency

I would say medium and then average revenue large and I'll explain the rational why I'm thinking it that way so for family the reach is large because just looking at the average population if I see people who are married people who have family with kids this is probably a much larger segment the frequency of Use might be smaller compared to the others in the sense because sometimes family may be constrained by Spring holidays winter vacation summer vacation kids going to school average revenue per user for families typically higher because they value Comfort value the safety

of the family a lot more compared to the others solo Travelers is still a pretty small Niche uh um the frequency of use I can say it's up to medium right like medium or small the reason why it's a large is because a solo travel cohort as such itself is not always unique like you may be Solo Traveler 80 of the time but sometimes you may switch cohorts and go on a couple of trips with your friends uh there are very few solo Travelers who are like doing it all the time and that's more as

a professional job um arpu I would say it's medium to small solo Travelers are more open to try group and shared experience to uh remove that loneliness for certain time um yeah group again medium frequency of use large because the group is dynamic it keeps changing hands different people can keep coming in so a group cohort as a whole typically would have a higher frequency of use they may not be bounded By uh School of children or spring breaks Etc over a period of time and we could take more annual trips average revenue per user

would be small but because it's a high ticket size like group by hole can bring a high ticket size so I'm just keeping it as a medium like if you break down to individual user in a group there capability to pay might be smaller because they may not be able to experiences because they can experience a lot of things as a group together but when you consider a whole group like five people four people going together even if they take one of your experience so one of your product because of the ticket size the revenue

may come be higher got it yeah sorry go ahead so for a group would it not be comparative for our poo as family then it would be compatible to family then but um our hypothesis is as a if I'm a as a family member you may want to prioritize the comfort and the safety of your kids and everyone more than the others costs a bit more okay yeah and as a group because there are so many people I mean just do Pub hopping even if I sit on a beach and do nothing as a friend

we can sit by bonfire talk play games There are a lot more things as a group you can do um and then safety everything may not be a concern for people people may take shared accommodations multiple people can stay within a room they can take a large house say so overall like I think intuitively the average spent of a family for travel is sometimes most of the time larger than a similar size group yeah okay that makes sense all right I think just when you're looking quantitatively and qualitatively um I would probably go with family

okay yeah cool um I think going back I think one thing that I miss discussing is on The Travelers I should have also broken it down as a sorry now that it matters now but what is important to note is Leisure and then business traveler right and and we don't need to do exercise again because I think business Travelers are strapped off time they go there for a very specific purpose uh and they may not have enough time or a high frequency of use of whatever product they're building so I think this prioritization still makes

sense I would still want to focus on Leisure and Focus on family and maybe maybe not think about business travels yeah when we think about local experiences yes they might not have that much time to participate in that exactly all right uh any question then before I move into user journey and quickly start with problems no it's very clear okay awesome all right quickly on a user Journey um say if I am planning a trip for my family I would maybe I have booked my flights I've booked my hotel I have decided maybe I'm staying

there for five five day four nights or Whatever frequency it is the next thing comes up okay what are some of the local experiences that I would share so probably I would be doing research call my friends basically try to ask them about it um over a period of time I think social validation and social proof has become more and more important um especially with a lot of people traveling they're seeding the information and again going for my personal experience I tend to talk to my friends who have been at the place my friends talk

to me if I've been to a place and they try to make a personal recommendation a lot more or take a recommendation within My own social group maybe my friends or remote friends Etc so research called my friends uh look at safety read reviews like is this family friendly place is it okay I'll take a typical user Journey this is not representative of everyone some people like do some sort of research call their friends look and check the reviews like what are some of the activities that are family friendly like if there's a pub crawl

tool that's happening probably not the best place I would like to take my two kids and my wife too um plan things out take feedback from family um finalize experience this is one user Journey couple of others more on the outside can be I don't plan anything do a basic check go to my place talk to the concierge at my hotel call a local guide and then just tell them to plan everything out so typical user Journey um more or less they are the same your intensity of research would vary on on the other Journeys

but this is typically what uh I would say a typical user would follow does that make sense and can I move it to the problems that makes sense I'm wondering on the experience side is there Um anything else in the journey yeah I would say on the experience side like if I want yeah we can we can go ahead and break it down to further things like uh yeah I would say when you're experiencing actually you may figure out that hey I plan to go to a museum I need to buy a ticket maybe I

need to stand in a queue to get that ticket uh I need to keep my family together say I'm in Disneyland and there are a lot of there's a big crowd I need to ensure my families together and save when you are experiencing for the full day you might have to solve for food I may be looking at for recommendations for what are some of the top local restaurants where I can eat takes take pics together how do I store all the pigs if I'm visiting a museum or any place of historical significance I may

want to know about history of the place as a history above need to know about some more information about the place while I'm experiencing it sometimes these things may enrich your experience overall knowing some background about the place may not be Applicable for everyone but some people really value these this part okay yeah um hi let's go into the problem and dive deep into them I think because we have already you know we went into a very specific Niche I think all our problems are related to itinery and your local experiences so building out the

itinerary on a place requires a lot of research and effort I think this is a broad plot problem statement if you want I can further break into sub problems I think this basically talks about research knowing what's interesting or what's interesting in the local area is a challenge prioritizing them finding them is a big challenge in itself another problem can be like keeping children busy at the event is challenging this is specifically true for families like they are going and seeing a museum or they're visiting a national park uh getting children busy is a big

problem for them and sometimes this becomes a determining Factor on how good or bad their experience is it sometimes ruins the entire experience they're not able to uh look at that miss out for a local lot of local recommendations which are not popular I think I don't know a lot of people are great and I'm guilty that when I go to Hawaii I travel it and I come back and dress oh there was one thing that I really missed out it's just because I didn't have a lot of good connections so nobody told me or

that place did not have a high SEO or search engine optimization I couldn't just find it so a lot of people miss out on local recommendations which are not popular and the final thing is lots of back and forth with the family on getting on the same page like hey this is the plan do you want to review it and there are not a lot of good ways you do that basically as a person I build out the plan I share it with my family members they look at it there's a bit back and forth

there um although I know the preferences and what they like there is no easy way for me to know whether this activity would be loved by them or whether they would like it or not so there's a lot of discussion and back and forth which further takes into time takes uh yeah is pretty challenging and assuming you haven't planned well in advance you go on a page you go to the concierge and they present you something with local options Getting on the same page might take some time and that may you're just basically wasting time

on your vacation which you might have spent enjoying out there right so these are some of the problems that I've uh that I could find out I think this problem is pretty broad I think if you're if you're okay with that diet I'm fine if you want we can break it into further sub problems as well up to you okay let's go with that in the interest of time and let me let me just go ahead and try to prioritize that the way I try to prioritize the problems is just looking at two important parameters

number of users and depth of pain is this problem affecting a small number of uses or a large number of users depth of pain is it a shallow pain are there substitute that I can look for or is is it actually a very deep pain that I'm going to try to solve for so building artery I think it applies to a lot of users at some point of time you would have to figure out what are the places you would go what are the places you would select what are the places you would try or

experiences that you would prioritize that's a lot of cognitive load on just Normal human being one not used to day-to-day research or building out dietary and the depth of pain is pretty large and I can tell it from my experience or my experience with my friends we're just throwing the ball at each other like hey can you plan can you plan so keeping children busy I kept it small because not everyone may have small children that need attention some may not have in families some may have bigger children who don't need handwriting attention although the

number of users are small the depth of pain is large because this problem is not frequently occurring but when it occurs it's really a big pain missing out a lot of local Air Condition I would say A medium not everyone does that some do that and whenever that happens the depth is not big like hey I wasted nine out of 10 places if I missed out one place like is it that big of a deal breaker would I be sad about that it's I would say it's a minor inconvenience a lot of back and forth

with family on getting to same page I would say um I would keep it small a lot of time different people may not have a point of view or point of opinion they said hey just figure out the best path and We'll be on the same page and even when it occurs I won't say that's a big problem or like you would enter into a fight or cancel the trip because you did not settle on a problem so questionable me and my brother gets in the fights all the time all the time I mean there

are several reasons you can get into fight too but okay if you're getting fighter these things the problem is bigger probably yeah yeah awesome um cool I think it's very intuitive it wasn't a hard prioritization that I have to look at I think probably the first one building out the itinerary of places which require a lot of research and effort I would just say that basically stands as a true winner over here so let me prioritize this problem and try to solve for this and this one can become as a second or third milestone in

our solution all right so here are some of the solutions that I quickly jotted down um that we'll have to discuss with you um let's start with the first one I just try to give every solution more like a code name or a nickname my naming is bad sir don't judge no it's great it's short and memorable all right so the first solution is local lens basically What we would do is you enter your destination and then what we will do is connect you to the local guides out there that can plan the journey end

to end um I see this as more as a white glove treatment and maybe for the most premium users like I don't want to spend any time in research you just tell me out there and then I can just hit look at the review of the guide hit next and then that guide can plan a custom item for me based on what I want to do whether I want to surprise my wife on a your trip at a Sunset Cruise or give a very lovely experience to my kids um the guys can do that for

me and as the guide going with you along or it's mostly they plant for you and then you go figure out yeah we can we can figure out a type of service like a guide can be a consultation only or a guide can be along with you only depends on what service type the guides provide and I think the local guide Market is very fragmented like you go to a place and you find a market I haven't seen any product and solution out there that have tried to combine the pool of guides together and bring

them on a platform Hmm um trip money you enter the destination you enter the budget uh the time that you have and this trip bunny builds out the entire schedule and plan for you so if you are going out for four days your budget is like a hundred dollars per day here are the list of activities that you can do here is a paid activity free activity that you can do and you can always go ahead and change it but it will give you a strong template and a full schedule to start with over a

period of time that can look taken into consideration your allergies your preferences you can connect your social profile and then I can also look at what kind of person you are a mountain person a beach person a party person a city person Etc so a lot of potential for this idea to further grow travel buddies inside enter destination and get picks and insights from your friends like it can look into my social graph all my friends who went to Hawaii and figured out what are the different places that they have been to I can look

at the personalized pick if I like someone I can always call them uh I will quickly pull out a trade-off here it's called the cold start problem because I need to have a lot of my Friends on the platform I need to allow users to connect the social profile and give me the auth permission to connect so it will have a cold start problem and we have to figure out what is that incentive because of which people will connect their accounts another thing is strip Marketplace thing like it can be a platform to share either

like I build a lot of Italy I share it with a lot of my friends for free of course but I would love if there's a marketplace where all these custom itineries that have built for my trip I can just share it out and maybe I can get rewarded and gain some points maybe virtual point that I can redeem for some awards or some discounts later which is very easy in the travel space as you get a lot of referral bonus and referral margins so these points can convert into valuable and so if I want

to go to Hawaii I just go Hawaii custom Italy trips and I can see a bunch of them this is much better than going on to Google searching multiple blogs not having credibility that I can see a rating and review finally MapQuest you enter a destination I'll figure out what are the different spots there and then you can build a full itinery Along with pit stops food joints where you can get fuel I think MapQuest is more a map-based solution for Road Trips Again if a target market maybe if I'm starting out in the US

where road trips are pretty popular and road trips are pretty popular with families go to National Park this can become a very strong Niche solution for people going on a road trip they don't have to plan anything just sit in your car leave your home and the app has everything figured out for you God so the difference between MapQuest and travel bunny uh travel travel money I think is not a full map based solution and it's more generic in nature I think whereas MapQuest focuses a lot more on your road trips and focus more on

fuels food joints [Music] yeah I can see a world where they both can converge like much later into the future but I think to start with probably keep them little separate okay right so what I'm going to do now is quickly do a quick prioritization based on reach impact and effort is this solution applicable to a wider audience a smaller audience is it more impactful getting them closer to their goals and then effort to build them and then we'll do a Quick prioritization on that again we'll do a same t-shirt sizing local lens I'll say

the reach is small because again this thing may come with its own Premium cost in premium charge I see it more of a white Club support for a premium users on the platform um I don't see a reach to be very high I mean these options are still available but a lot of lot of people may use it um so I would say the reach is small impact can be pretty high because hey if you can get someone to work for you um and build the whole thing for you the impact can be high effort

yeah I see there you have a question yeah go ahead what's the difference between reach and impact um reach can be number of people Your solution is applicable to impact and talk more about how deeply the solution solves your problem like does it solve I slightly does it solve more uh and again if we had set up our own norstar metrics and kpis I would set and look at how much closer to our goals and kpis would this impact is taking us to I've also added a sort of adoption lens like I also see in

terms of adoption uh where it will work got it but quickly yeah the reason I said it's small it can be more of A premium whitelift service impact is super high effort to build is small but effort to Scout local guides convince them to be on a platform and because they are more of a fragmented Market getting them of a platform may be a significant effort so I put the effort as medium over here trip bunny definitely High Reach because it's a very generic solution that takes in my choices and preference and build out an

Italy for me impact can be pretty high at least that's what we aim for it will solve all your problems the effort to build might be very high in the sense because even if I start with a very small Market say just California and I need to have a lot more destination I need to find out what are the local things there so there's a lot of leg work to build out uh this thing and then I have to build out the whole matching algorithm and probably want to find out some USB where I can

learn from uh my users so that I don't face a fear of disruption because I think this idea if I just do it on a very simple rule based thing can be easily copied and disrupted so I need to find that unique thing in my algorithm that can make it accurate and I would Say therefore it can be pretty high to do that just to find out the local location the also the other problem with going very Niche or very small is hey Trip Finder just for San Francisco I think adoption would take a lot

more a lot more time if I just go very small here trip buddies inside the reach might be very small just because of the cold start problem how not a lot of people may agree to share their data with a platform um as such building this solution we have a small reach kind of a medium impact because the data will be very unstructured coming from my friends they may not be covering everything even if I look at their data I may not make any strong conclusions on how do I plan my trip like I still

might do some more research and so it solves my pain point but not to a complete extent what I would say would be pretty small because I literally cannot go and convince folks I think it's just more about the building the insulin platform and basically doing some more effort on the marketing uh side trip Marketplace uh medium reach um more in the sense of um my platform will be restricted by the number of people I can get on my platform with custom Itineries like it may happen that I may get a lot of libraries about

Hawaii very less I tell you about California and such so even if I go to niche market uh I will still be constrained by the number of people who build out the italies and share on the platforms I would say A medium reach the impact can be super high if we have a strong rating and strong waiting process in the beginning effort can also be very high in actually building out the whole Marketplace platform if that's the MVP of a product having a both a service provider side and a service receiver side MapQuest uh a

medium reach considering maybe for target market is U.S to begin with there are a lot of road trips it's still not as high as a trip money because again it's again into niche of um road trips so I wouldn't say that reach would be very high impact can be pretty good effort will be pretty high again because I would have to integrate with map based API figure out the different nodes and point find out the optimal path so I can see yeah if I have to say I would probably even go Excel because building out

a map is solution and finding out pit stops and food joints and fuel can be a pretty Intensive effort uh I think the two candidates that stand out are trip Bunny and trip Marketplace uh similar impact similar effort but I guess the reach for trip money might be slightly higher than trip Marketplace because we can quickly out Source a lot of information in-house and can ensure the quality getting a lot of quality italies out might be tough and take more time yeah and then so what about effort between these two like if now we're comparing

these two in terms of effort do we think they're the same level of effort that you labeled it both large yeah now that I have an extra characteristic of excel probably I would say this will be large trending more towards excel in my opinion and let me let me give me let me pause and think about a little bit more to go back to my thoughts yeah I'll probably keep them the same right because what I'm looking for is not just the engineering effort but I'm thinking about more of the launch effort while destination building

is more of an in-house team I may spend a lot more time on the actual build the build here would be slightly similar like because I would have to build out more of a Marketplace Model and a platform model compared to more of an in-house first party solution I would also have to and this might be easier because I may not have to focus on a as deep in algorithm or mapping right as I'm doing in trip bunny but at the same time my effort would also be increased by sourcing out these people who would

basically be the seed sellers on my platform like hey inviting a lot of people to build out the itineries maybe I can see this with a lot of you know like in-house account like how Amazon does they have a WS retail entity which acts like a third party seller but it belongs to Amazon like maybe that's a good idea I can start for trip marketplace with that in that case my effort can probably be medium it might be a smaller effort yeah it depends on the incentives you mentioned above that you might incentivize them with

points or maybe they can translate those points into things they can buy travel with yeah yeah the point is right when you you open the platform incentive there has to be a proper wetting structure like I cannot post any content without review like what people have profane language abusing like they put profane images I see in the beginning when I'm going I have a brand to build I would not be comfortable putting out any content without properly wetting and thoroughly looking at it so the amount of research I'll be doing in trip bunny for a

particular place I would have to do almost similar research here because I'll be vetting uh what the users are proposing on the platform at least initially over a period of time I will have certain power users who I can have more relaxed criteria compared to libraries or build out uh foul language detection algorithm or yeah Etc but I think in the beginning my effort would be similar when I said the effort can be minimum is when I was thinking that hey maybe I can see this place see the marketplace with lot of Bot entries like

hey build out like a few users uh and then they can be sharing the itineraries over there so I can see the marketplace with some of the initial users who are our in-house content writers yeah that way that what might become a little bit medium that's okay but again yeah I think overall yeah if I were to do that yeah I think it might be better so I'm right now divided probably Between trip Bunny and trip Marketplace uh give me 30 seconds and probably I can think about uh more way to prioritize which of the

solution I'll be going forward does that make sense I think if I'm thinking my reach an impact could be similar uh my reach is smaller over here but my foot is smaller I think another thing I would do and look at is my starting business goal which I've sent is adoption I would probably go forward and see which one of them will lead to better adoption the only challenge which I see with the trip Marketplace is the whole idea of trust if I'm coming into a particular Marketplace and I see identities by different people do

I trust them it's something that we need to be tested out initially right and adoption may take much longer because first we have to build a trust in the market have people trust out it whereas on trip bunny it's something that has been generated based on user own preference at least from the ux perspective I enter my destination budget and the system basically builds out an iTune for me that I can edit in system and go forward with it I think this one would be closely tied to our brand may lead To better adoption and

may have lesser adoption concerns and lesser trust and safety concern uh yeah also I I would say there may be also privacy concerns that people may feel that hey like a lot of strangers may be knowing that I'm purchasing an artery for them that maybe I'm going here whereas on the on the trip bunny it might be restricted within a first party platform trip Bunny and I'm sharing my data with only one company so there may be perceived privacy concerns as well in one scenario versus the other I think so based on all those factors

I'll probably lean towards uh trip bunny great shall we debrief yeah sure all right so let's talk so so many things that worked and I got a chance to write it down so let me talk through it so if we start at the top what I'd like that you did here was the why you basically analyzed like how a business would think about entering a space how big is it is it growing macro conditions competitors it's kind of funny because I was creating a video for this uh thing today and those are the exact points

I mean if you've done Consulting before they cover those things as well so that just felt very business Savvy versus I see a lot of people kind of just speak to oh like travel space is interesting it's exciting it's like Mission oriented and that's about it but you always have to realize that business is building this and they're going to care about the things that you mentioned uh value chain like you said this travels space is very broad so narrowing down seemed to have helped you dive into becoming more specific rather than feeling overwhelmed by

this whole Space so good job covering all the different competitors and prioritizing the local experiences um as to being the space that maybe needs more solutions than the other ones that are a bit crowded I like the mission as well usually the mission is a bit contrived but I like how you emphasize what you mean by beautiful memories a lot of times the words itself sound generic but when you kind of explained it it's like okay I can see how we're gonna make what we're striving for unique business goal was really helpful especially narrowing on

the metric and then you brought that back towards the end to help you prioritize Solutions so that felt good The Who through Was again super exhaustive so great you probably didn't need to go into service providers uh uh as in write down all those stocks because we actually didn't talk through it um so that was that is someone where people you guys can save time if you need um something I want to call out that you did consistently and just really stood out was your prioritization so it was very clear every step of the way

why you chose what you chose why this was like a large versus medium and I think that stood out to show that you're a logical thinker that you make decisions based on data versus based on what you feel so that was consistent in the user part and the pain points part and the solutions part so that really stood out so as always what are two to three tips you would give to people to help them build strength and product sense because a lot of people struggle with this type of question um sure interestingly I wrote

an article on LinkedIn um a few days back guys make sure to check that out um I think I would say you know focus on why more as a PM it's a very cliche and very popular thing is fall in love with the problem and not Solution yes so focus on your why your mission and business school really important I see the best of candidates fail at why they jump straight into the users a problem in solution but focus a lot more on why it shows your strategic side one good way to develop strong product

sales is basically to expose yourself to more products like look at what are the different products out there do a lot of product teardowns think about how those problems exist um and typically you know we don't get to experience all of them for example right when I Was preparing for my PM interview journey I don't use a health tracker a Fitbit or an Apple Watch at all and I was thinking hey what if somebody asked me a question around that of course I can say I don't use that and I'm a plumber something but unless

I experience it I wouldn't know about it right so try to get more exposure look at what are the interesting apps out there what are some of the interesting design patterns product patterns out there once you start looking different products in your mind you will start connecting the dots and start seeing a different pattern and that basically that's what we call basically A product sense you look at the problem you will understand what users might need and what would be a good solution to serve them so as always Abhishek amazing job you need to teach

folks this um because you've got a lot of amazing insights so again thank you so much for your time this is as always super super fun and I know everyone's going to find a lot of value in this thank you Dana I really appreciate the work you're doing for the PM community and we're just putting out for free there for people so I love to come to your platform because I see you as a person who genuinely wants to help people and help people break into PM so thanks for the amazing work you're doing kudos

to you the work we are doing because you are part of this journey so thank you so much for being part of this community thank you Diana thanks a lot as as always it was amazing talking to you amazing having those discussions yay and I will see you guys later