Transcription
So Yun, how would we fix Airbnb's worst post-booking experience?
Hi everyone, I'm Diana, one of your favorite PM coaches. Today, I have Yun here who is going to go through a DoorDash question with us. So, do you want to give a short intro?
Yeah, hello everybody. My name is Yun. I was a PM at Microsoft and another AI company, and I recently joined DoorDash.
Huge congrats, Yun! Not many people pass the R interviews. So, she was gracious enough today to give you guys a snippet because her big pain point was not being able to find much information from DoorDash.
Yeah, yeah, that was it was hard to prepare that interview. Hope this could be helpful for everyone here.
And she made it! So today, we're going to have her excellence to show us the way to tackle this question, which is: Yun, let's say you're a PM on Airbnb. How, what might we fix the worst post-booking experience?
BB, can I have one minute to organize my thoughts first?
Of course.
Uh, let's say couple bullet points. That's how I'm going to start talking about the interview. Um, the question. Um, I will start talking about the product. U, try to understand what is Airbnb for the users and how they make money. Uh, and then goes through the metrics. Uh, pick one of the metrics that will be our North Star metric to evaluate this pro, the the questions. And then go to the user journey, or we call it how it works, to understand, um, the whole process. And then from that, uh, it was just easier for me to go through, go through that first, and then find the pain points during that journey. Uh, and, uh, uh, we'll prioritize them based on some criteria I picked. Um, and then maybe pick one use a pinpoint to go, go to the solution space. Does that sound good?
Fantastic. And then I'll be asking follow-up questions along the way. So if you can take pauses throughout.
Yeah, awesome. Sounds good.
Um, so yeah, so let's get started. Um, for Airbnb, I think most people know it. Uh, it's a marketplace for owners to rent their places. Uh, so the guests can stay for their trip, and guests can find the place that they want to stay, um, during their trip. And it's different than hotels. It's more like a home, homey experience and more local, homie. Um, and I used it before, like when I was in, uh, uh, going to Hawaii, that I don't want to stay in a hotel. It's super expensive, and also I want to have some friends, um, to, to make some friends when I was there. Um, I think many people kind of do that way.
Um, for while we talk about that, what is Airbnb, we also mention about the users. Uh, the user segments for Airbnb. Uh, there are two user segments, I would say, maybe let's say, uh, one we call that host, um, who the owner of the house, and they rent the places out. Um, another is it's called a guest, uh, like you book the place to stay. Um, and we can say Airbnb as a third party of this whole, uh, platform. Um, and themselves, they want to make money. Um, and, and the, um, business model, I would like to mention here a little bit, so that will impact the metrics I pick later. How Airbnb makes money is based on the charging fees for every of the transactions. When you book nights or book experiences there, uh, they charge fees, uh, for each of the, uh, charge certain fees for each of the transactions.
And that leads us to the metrics. What metrics I want to pick for this, um, uh, whole problem that we're supposed to booking experience?
Yeah, I'll have you brainstorm a couple and then maybe tell me which one you would prioritize.
Okay, sounds good. Give me 30 seconds to think about all the metrics I should pick.
Good. I wrote down three metrics here when I was thinking about what metrics we can, um, pick. The number one is the number of nights booked and stayed per day, which I mean here, they successfully, um, checked in and stayed at that place, not just, not just booked, and then for some reason, you didn't go. I don't think that to count. Uh, the reason I picked this one is I think this is a North Star for Airbnb, because this is the intersection of all three parts: host, guest, and Airbnb. A host gets value when people book the nights, they make the money, and guests get the value, they find a good place for them to stay. U, so they get the value when the nights are booked and stayed. And for, of course, Airbnb, they get the value, U, because they make money for, um, for every transaction, for every stay. Um, and I know they really care about this number of nights, and they have a lot of reports. They keep talking about how they're growing this number of nights booked. It's very important to them.
Um, for retention, initially I thought about retention, maybe retention for this problem, but I find it's really hard to use retention here. Here's my reason. Um, when a customer has a bad experience, the impact is they might not come back for, uh, book another trip, use Airbnb to book another trip. But, uh, it's hard to measure because you're not using it as a person. Like me, I might go travel twice a year, but some people might travel once a year, or some people might travel, you know, even less frequent. So if they don't come back in, let's say, in a year, you can't say it's because they have a bad experience there. It might be just they're not traveling that frequent, or it might be the places they go, uh, they don't have Airbnb there. They, they have more hotel choices there, so they end up choosing hotels, uh, other than Airbnb. So I found retention is really hard to measure here. Um, so I'm not going to pick this one.
Okay, I also thought about using rating as a metric here, but I also find it not that great to be used here, um, because not everybody gives ratings. Normally, only you have a very good experience or very bad experience, the very extreme experiences, and then you give ratings. Most people are just lazy, not get ratings. So I find that ratings is not, may not be a good metric here either.
Right, so let's go with, yeah, number of nights booked.
Yeah, okay. Sounds good. Here's the user journey of using Airbnb. It covers both the sides, the host and the guest. Yeah, let's take a look at the pain points and feel free to take 30 seconds.
Yeah, so, uh, I will work on the pain points for both of the parties. I think this whole journey covers both of the parties and, um, yeah, give me 30 seconds.
Sounds good. Thank you.
And since we're talking about post the booking experience, and I'm going to only talk about the pain points like post the booking.
Yeah, perfect. That's good.
Okay, I'm ready to, uh, talk about the pain points. Um, so let's say pain points for guests and hosts. Um, for guests, I'm thinking about post-booking, what other things can happen that go? Mhm, uh, uh, one thing is cancellation that charges a high fee. You, if you want to change your plan, sometimes they don't let you cancel, or if you cancel, you have to charge a high fee like that. That's painful when you, when you, that's painful when you don't have that budget for that. And hard to find the place. I had one time, like I was, when as I mentioned, I was in Maui, that place was in our middle of some forest. So actually it takes me a while to find that place, and there was no information about it on the on the Airbnb information on the Airbnb, like the detail page. I had to, I had to kind of like navigate it myself, and Google doesn't work very well there.
And then the second problem can, the third problem can happen is you can't check in. It can be multiple reasons, like there's no room available. Like you, you went there, there was, uh, no room available, and that had happened to me once, that I, I booked the Airbnb with my friends, and I didn't really look for the confirmation email. I thought it was just done, you know, I booked it, and I thought it was done. But then when I got there, I can't get into the apartment. I was looking for some information to get to the apartment, but there's no information. So I had to call the host, and finally find the host, and the host is like, oh, I haven't done Airbnb for a while. Like my room, it's not available. So that messed up my whole trip there. It was very hard to find another no room immediately at that moment. We already got there, and I had to change all my plans. Okay.
And, uh, sometimes the key doesn't work or the password doesn't work. They, you have to like contact customer service or host to get that right.
During stay there, multiple things can be wrong. Like you find, you finally got this place, but then you find out, oh, the place doesn't look as nice as what it is advertised. Advertised. The pictures always flatter. Um, and you might find some of the, uh, supplies or equipment not working. Like maybe the refrigerator is not working. That can be a big problem. Um, or the toilet is not flushing. Yeah, that that's annoying. Um, and since Airbnb is not the same as a hotel, they, they have people cleaning, but it might not be that as professional cleaning as a hotel. So people sometimes complain this is the place is not that clean.
Um, and depends on location, some of the locations, since you was the first time you got there, you might feel like the neighborhood is not that safe. It can, it's a new place for you, and if something looks kind of scary, the neighborhood, you might feel like I don't want to go out. You kind of just want to stay there, and you're concerned about the safety issue. And safety concern can be another, uh, thing that when you share the place with other people. Some people Airbnb to share the place with the host or other, um, roommates who are traveling. You don't know them. It's the first time everybody meets, right? You don't know who are who they are, what they do. Um, and your door might not be that secure, might, might not be security locked, right? So you might be concerned though my stuff being stolen, or or it can happen to somebody, maybe their stuff really got stolen or damaged by other people.
Um, and sometimes you do have to, like, contact a host for something. They can, it's there's no like direct, like, uh, so there's no guarantee they will respond. Um, and most of the time, they, the host left all the kind of papers about all the instructions in the room. But if you need help, um, so they, it can be like frustrating when the host are not responding. Um, and yeah, another extreme example can be dangerous accidents, like there's a fire, there's a gas leak happening in the house. Yeah, that that can really mess up your trip. Now, pretty extreme. Okay, but yeah, worst experiences that would make the news. Yeah, yeah. And last one, bad, bad customer service. Like it can be, you have some issues, but you try to find customer service to help, but it's not working. U, that's also a bad experience.
I also list a couple here for the host. Before we go prioritize them, I quickly talk about that. U, for the host, I think host booking experience means they already have their places set up there. So I'm not going to talk about that. I can think of two. Is one is the customers make some damage to the house. It can be a small, um, damage for some small items, but it can be big damages as well. And another issue is like checkout. If the previous customer checks out late, and then you don't have that much cleaning time, and then it might mess up your next guest's check-in time. You might leave bad impressions or bad reviews about because of that.
Yeah, any question here before we go prioritization?
Oh, you were really exhaustive and spoke to a lot of my experiences that have happened once or twice. Amazing. So I'll have you prioritize, maybe instead of going through the whole list, just for time, what maybe feels like the top three? And then within the top three, talk me through how you're thinking about the.
Yeah, and feel free to take 30 seconds.
Yeah, okay. And give me one minute to think about that. There's many pain points here. First of all, I would like to talk about my criteria that I prioritize them. Um, I would like to prioritize them by pain level, how painful it is, the impact on the metrics, which we picked before, was number of nights booked. Um, and the frequency, how often it happens. And I rate them like by low, medium, low, medium, high for each of them. Um, since we don't have time to go through all those, I quickly went through all the list here and I would like to talk about these three as my top three problems that I, uh, think they are. Um, the reason I picked these three is, no, I think they are the based on these criteria, there's more painful ones that can happen. So we're going to talk about one by one. So, no room available. That's very, um, painful. I think that's the highest pain point here. You don't have a place to stay, right? Um, of all the pain points here, I would rate this one as the highest pain point. Others, you, you kind of have, you have a place to stay. It's just something is not working. But this one has the biggest pain. You don't have a place, and if you go book a room right now to go some other places, you might not have a place like, uh, immediately, or it can be extremely expensive if you book last minute, right? So I think that's the biggest pain point here. And this, no key or password. This kind of one is painful because you might not be able to get in. But why I rate it medium is because normally you can find a way to solve that problem. Like you can contact the host or customer service to get that problem solved. It might take some time, but eventually, I believe it should be solved. And place is not clean. It's kind of annoying. You want to have a nice place. It's painful. Um, everybody, I think everyone prefers like a nice place. But I would say this compared with all of all the pain points here, it's kind of not that high as a pain point here.
And then, um, thinking about all the safety concerns. Those also feel like there's a potential that could lead to you have a room, but it's not really stable, like whether it's a dangerous accident, it's not safe.
Yeah, yeah. I thought about the safety. I was thinking that I would rate them like medium, um, for maybe the pain level, um, similar as a place is not clean, because you, it's, it's you, you have that place, you have that concern, but it's not like bad things are going to happen to you for sure. Like you have that plan, you have a place to stay, you feel kind of the neighborhood is not safe, but it's not like a bad thing is going to happen on you. It might still be fun, but you might have that concern. So it blocks you from preventing coming back to Airbnb to book again. So I would rate the impact on metrics as medium. But frequency-wise, I would also rate it kind of like a medium-wise. It's not, or maybe, or I would say low, maybe low or medium. It's not that frequent. Like you find a place that that bad. Normally, you will, like, stay at a place that you reviewed it before, you think it's a good place to stay. So I don't think it's that big surprise normally that happens. Oh, I booked this place, and then the place, it totally seems like such a bad neighborhood, something like that. Yeah, most look at that beforehand, so they know whether they are booking a place that's safe or not safe. Yeah, they kind of have that expectation already. If they choose a kind of maybe a area like that, maybe cheaper, or for some other reason they stay there.
And so another one is the impact on the metrics, like how bad it will impact the nights. Number of nights booked. I rate there, no room available as the highest, because this is the direct impact. Like if I don't have a room available right now, then it does not count as one of the nights booked and stayed, right? That's the number one thing we want. We are looking at. And also it will prevent again coming back to Airbnb and book another trip again. Like you don't trust Airbnb anymore. You think, oh, I booked there and I go there, there's no room available. And next time when you go travel again, I don't think you're going to choose Airbnb. Say, oh, I want to stay there. That's like, I think that's the highest pain point there. That's the highest, uh, impact on the number of nights booked. Okay. Um, in others, I think this one I kind of rate it medium, or maybe can be high, that unless this password is totally not working, you can't figure out the right way to get into the house, and then it does not count as number of nights booked and stayed. But if it works, somehow you eventually get that work, you still can stay this time, but you might be feeling like, oh, so much work to check in. Next time I might don't stay, I might don't choose Airbnb. So I kind of rate it as a medium impact on the future on number of nights booked. And for others, place is not clean. I think it depends, and place is not safe, depends on, you know, how bad it is, how bad the cleanness situation is. If it's some, a little bit not clean, you're picky about it, you might still feel okay, you can still, you might still choose Airbnb next time. But if it's so bad, you, you might not choose Airbnb next time. So, so kind of, kind of balance it out, feel like a medium.
My third criteria is frequency, but I would maybe weigh it less in this problem, because we are talking about the worst post-booking experience. I was thinking like the, um, room no room available. It probably happens not that often. So I rate it as low. But this, maybe let's say overall, there's only 1% of users have that problem. But the overall 1% user can be still a large amount of users because Airbnb has a large user group. So I would weigh less of overall criteria. So based on that, I would think if I only pick one of the pain points there, for the guest side, I will probably, I will still pick this no room available as my the worst post-book experience that can happen because it has the biggest pain level, has and has the biggest impact on the metrics and number of nights booked. Even though it happens less frequency, but it's still a large user group that we should still focus on that.
Okay, that makes sense to you, Diana?
Yeah, that makes sense. The rationale was very thorough. Yeah, we didn't get to prioritize the hosts. What do we think? How do we think they measure up on the criteria that you shared?
Yeah, so, uh, for the two pain points here, uh, I didn't mention them in my top three pain points overall. Uh, I kind of feel like this, like for example, the damage thing. I kind of feel like it's maybe, um, medium, like kind of pain point level, because it, and it depends on how bad the damage. If it's kind of small damage, they can still fix it. The host will probably still put their places on Airbnb, unless it's like such, it's a very bad, kind of damage, and then they can't, they were like so frustrated about Airbnb users. But most users are not. I don't think that will, uh, be that bad normally. And also the frequency will be pretty low. Um, so, so I didn't pick this as my top pain points. Um, and a late checkout. It can be a sometimes it can be okay because you might not have the second day booked. You, you still have the time to clean it up. Or sometimes it might have some impact, like mess up your schedule that you have to quickly clean up for the next guest. But I don't think overall it's that painful. Maybe the pain level I will rate it like low or medium, depending on the situation. And then I don't think that will prevent the host to continue posting their places on Airbnb, right? It's just a late checkout. They think that user has a problem. They don't think it's that bad normally. They don't think that bad to, uh, continue renting their places on Airbnb. So I think maybe, um, and the frequency maybe low or medium. So that's why I didn't mention them as my top three you pain points.
All right, let's go to solutions for no room available.
So yeah, yeah, take a sec.
Okay, let me, um, let me get, give me 30 seconds to think about solutions.
All right, sounds good. Ready?
I got a couple options here, couple ideas here. And I just wanted to reiterate the pain. So no room available, it's those cases when you had booked something and thought it was available, but it ended up not being available when you showed up or something like that.
Yeah, when you showed up, you found out there's no room, there's no place for you to stay that day. So it's a very big bad experience. It's kind of the biggest pain point. So I was thinking, uh, those solutions here, I was thinking kind of, I kind of bucket them into two buckets. One is how to, kind of prevent that happening. Another bucket is when it really happens, what do we do? Because you can't make everything perfect, right? But then if you can make up for it, the user can still be happy, and they might still choose Airbnb. Like, oh, they're customer service is so good. I can, I feel like even though that happens, right? So to prevent that happening, I have one idea here is, um, based on my personal experience, the host was not active on Airbnb, somehow he didn't remove the listing there, and I can still book it. Um, so I think there it can be some, um, uh, regular checks. We can check if based on some metrics, like, you, we can use machine learning to check some of the hosts if they're active or inactive. Like, does this host have any conversation with customers in the last month? Is there anything changed? Any editing? Based on all those things, we can see if this host is active or inactive host. And if we define some inactive hosts, we can delete those listings, so prevent that happening. Um, um, maybe, oh, I also think another one, like to prevent that happening, like also have that, like what we call confirmation check with the, uh, guest. Like you booked that, what I mean is, you, the host, the guest booked that place, you made that reservation, but like me, I never know or I never look up to say if this is, I got confirmation or something like that. So there can be some reminder or confirmation sent from Airbnb, just say, hey, you booked that place, do you want, but there's no confirmation, or, uh, there seems something wrong, like you want to double check or something like that. If the host has not been responding for a while, and then Airbnb can send that confirmation or reminder to the guest to prevent that happening. Okay. And so that's my first bucket. Second bucket, when it happens, what can we do? I have a couple ideas here. First one, I think it's like, you don't have a place to stay right now, you have to find another place to stay, and you are Airbnb, you should have other Airbnb places to stay. So you, there, guests should have priority to, you know, like book a place nearby that for sure, you guarantee that places. You find some places nice nearby, even though maybe cost a higher price, but Airbnb should cover that cost or something like that for the, for the guest. And then another place is another idea is if we don't have enough Airbnb places nearby in this location, let's say we're in a location that's not that many listings. It can be we partner with hotels. Like they should, hotels normally have more options that you offer them free hotels at staying at this places. And that can be partnership with some, you know, hotel chains, so make sure you got a good variety of hotel options, so guests can choose where they want, they want to stay. Another one here, kind of maybe fun to try that partner with RVs or camping vans. Because the people who are booking Airbnb, a lot of them are kind of adventurous spirit, they have their, they want to experience different places. Like if you offer them RVs or camping vans, that's a total different experience, but fun and unique. They might end up like, wow, oh, Airbnb is so fun. Like, and it's interesting. So they might have that totally change their their mindset of Airbnb with that no room available, and then to something like this is fun. So I think that's something also Airbnb can try. Or they can try something like, I know they're trying doing something like called Icons, that Airbnb owns the places, they make that places a very unique experience, and they build the houses like that, a totally different experience. The idea here is similar, they offer something very cool, unique, to the guests with priority. Like you have to offer them a places. So yeah, any questions here, Diana?
Yeah, no, no questions. I like the preventative versus kind of post they're bound to happen no matter how much we try to prevent them. Solid list of solutions. Okay, let's leave it.
Amazing. Awesome. Thank you for going through this question again. There's not much information out there for you folks that are going to be interviewing with DoorDash. So Yun provided one. What was stellar about this interview was the structure, right? Not only did she walk us through the structure in the beginning, but in each section, it was very clear, clear what her decision criteria was going to be upfront, even for the solutions. She said, we have preventative versus post, if this happens, solutions. So just throughout, it's very, very easy to follow. The second thing that stood out was your user empathy. As we went through the story and the pain points, you talked about your Maui trip, you talked about how frustrating it would be for certain guests, and you used that to prioritize as well. So that was really helpful to show to DoorDash that you can get into the shoes of a user and thoroughly feel their pain to be that All-Star PM, to predict the pain of these potential customers ahead of time and to solve for that, and to, yeah, have the company take responsibility for that. Because what they're going to be doing is, by doing that, for example, you had the solution of, oh, booking them another Airbnb on Airbnb's cost, right? This is a way to show that companies are investing in these customers long term.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So amazing work, Yun. Thank you.
Any last words for the guest?
Um, no, I think I think I had a great experience with Diana. I really appreciate her, uh, insight. That was very helpful, and I hope everyone can find this helpful as well to make, make your job hunting journey a little bit easier.
Yes, it's going to be one of the few, um, videos online on DoorDash interviews. So don't worry, they'll come find to you. Thank you all. Hope you guys enjoyed it.
Thank you everyone. Bye.