Imagine you’re a Product Manager at Airbnb. You have been assigned the task of adding a new feature that could be useful to the Airbnb user base. It must include an integration with an external third-party/non-Airbnb API.

Vacation accommodation: one of the primary purposes.
Business travel: for longer stays or when attending conferences or events in different cities.
Short-term rentals: such as temporary relocations, home renovations, or visiting family and friends.
Special events or celebrations: such as weddings, birthdays, or anniversaries.
Local experiences: such as tours, workshops, and cultural activities.

I will focus on the segments of Vacation accommodation, and Short-term rentals because I consider these are the purposes that bring the most visits from users.

These are the users' needs and pains list from these two users' segments, related to the using purpose.

Needs and Pains

Book the right place: Users want to book the right place according to their expectations and the purpose of the booking. They look for a comfortable place and safety, well-maintained properties with essential amenities and security features, conveniently located near tourist attractions, restaurants, public transportation, or other points of interest, and the right accommodation type such as entire homes, apartments, private rooms, or shared spaces.
Budget: users have budget constraints and look for accommodations that fit within their financial limits.
Uncertainty and Risk: particularly if they are unfamiliar with the property or destination.
Complexity of Options: the abundance of choices can make the navigation challenging to compare properties and make informed decisions.
Lack of Trust and Verification: Concerns about inaccurate descriptions, misleading photos, or unreliable hosts can undermine confidence in the booking process.

According to revenue potential and the complexity of implementing an upgrade

Neeed / PainRevenueEffortJustification

Book the right place	High	Medium	Increase the conversion rate. Improving this requirement depends on the amount and quality of the accommodations published, and that depends on the good results provided by the booking platform to the hosts.
Budget	Medium	High	Increase the conversion rate. Implies increment the booking offer and/or the payment options.
Uncertainty and Risk	Low	High	Low impact on the conversion rate. Adding more verifications to decrease this risk could be difficult in some regions.
Complexity of Options	Low	Medium	Low impact on the conversion rate. The current platform is proficient in this aspect.
Lack of Trust and Verification	Medium	Medium	Increase the conversion rate. Improving this depends on the quality of the publication performed by the publisher and the validations performed by the platform.

I will focus on the following need and pain

Book the right place
Lack of Trust and Verification

These are some solutions that involve an external third-party/non-Airbnb API.

Add to publications the option of a kind of "augmented experience" leveraged with AI, taking the published photos and adding elements with AI prompts, showing what this place could look like for different purposes of uses where it is allowed.
Use AI to improve posts by helping users with data to complete their posts such as descriptions, photo enhancements, and other recommendations by taking similar previous posts.
Use blockchain technology to verify user identity and improve security and transparency on the platform. By implementing blockchain-based solutions, Airbnb can increase user trust and improve the overall booking and hosting experience.
Add a section of recommended activities as well as places to visit on the navigation page of the publication based on location and other options that the user can select, to help during the user's search and decision making.

I'll evaluate the solutions estimating the effort, the ux impact, and the business impact

SolutionEffortUXBusiness

AI-augmented experience	Medium (we could use tools like Sora, DALL-E, and others)	High (it suggests experiencies, it would be something new)	High (would promote the platform and increase the conversion rate)
Use AI to improve posts	Medium (could use some LLM APIs available on the market)	Medium (facilitate the post creation to the users)	Medium (better posts improve conversion rates)
Use blockchain to verify user identity	High (could be hard to implement)	Medium (people trust on blockchain)	Medium (trust increasing, improve conversion rates)
Recommended activities y and places	Low (current data could be used for this proposal)	Medium (could be useful)	Low (could be out of the business scope)

Finally, my choice is the AI-enhanced experience. It would be something novel that helps the user to make the decision, and thus increase conversion rates on the platform.

As third-party APIs for implementation, OpenIA's APIs for image manipulation could be used, which with the help of graphic designers and using data such as location, weather, and date of the year, we could achieve great compositions applied to the published photos.

Ujjwald · Answer 2 · 2024-06-09T03:34:39+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

is a product where hosts can host guests in a free room that they have. It behaves like a marketplace of rooms where the host can add rooms and the guests can book those rooms

Step 2 - Scope the question

I wanted to understand if there is any specific part of the app you wanted me to focus on. Also, when you say "useful", how would be define that. Is that an increase in engagement, or anything else?

For now, I will assume I can focus on any part of the app and look at increasing the engagement.

Step 3 - List the user groups and pick one

AirBnB is really a 2 sided marketplace that has the hosts and the guests. There is a flywheel effect in that if there are more bookings, there will be more hosts as word spreads that this is a nice way to earn a side income, and as there are more hosts, there will be more guests. Is there any specific experience (host vs guest) that you want me to focus on.

I will assume that we will focus on the guest experience here.

Also, a guest can visit for a leisure visit or a business trip. I will focus on the casual visit use cases here.

Step 4 - List and prioritize the pain points

Journey	Pain Point	Severity
Search for Airbnb in the area you are visiting	How far is the AirBnB from various points in my itinerary	L (This is a huge pain point when I am trying to book an accomodation)
	What transport options are available to reach the place	S (You can ask around and Uber is always available)
	How safe is the area where I am staying	L (Safety is an issue in today's world)
Book your AirBnb	NA	NA
Land at the airport and visit the AirBnB to check in	No one is available to give me the keys	S (There are existing solutions including calling and chatting with the host)
	The room isn't clean	S (There are existing solutions including calling and chatting with the host)
Do your sightseeing and then go back	Best place to get the local shopping experience.	L (it isn't that easy for normal tourists to get a great local shopping exprience)
	Unable to find good places to eat	L (The best places to eat are often something that people seek out when they visit a new place)
	If I am buying passes, such as rail passes or amusement park passes, I need to keep them someplace safe and they could get lost	S (Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are already available for this)
Vacate your AirBnB on your check out date	Unable to get a ride back to the airport	NA
	Unaware of the traffic situation at that time of the day.	S (You will usually check the local traffic conditions so it wont be that much of a surprise)

Based on the above, there are 4 pain points that we should focus on.

How far is the AirBnB from various points in my itinerary?
How safe is the area where I am staying?
It is very confusing to understand the best place to get a local shopping experience
Unable to find good places to eat

Step 5 - List the solutions and their priorities

Pain Point	Solution	Impact	Engineering Effort
How far is the AirBnB from my itinerary	Have a map view of AirBnB to see where it is	S (This can already be done in the current experience)	None
	Search for a specific area and book there	S (Can already be done with the current experience)	None
	Upload your itinerary and get recommendations based on the closest AirBnBs	L (If you can upload the current itinerary in a format set by AirBnB then we can take a look at the places and recommend best AirBnBs in that area. We know that downtown is a great place to stay but very expensive, however there will be some properties that will be reasonably priced even there.)	M (A new section with a format for uploading the daywise itinerary and then we need to integrate with the Google Maps Places API to see what could be the most central location)
How safe is the area	Ask other AirBnB guests who stayed at the place	S (Could be a privacy issue but we could take their permission before hand. However, no integration available here)	S (Not much in terms of effort here)
	Summarize reviews of the place from other AirBnB guests	L (This will be a good one to have. We can integrate with a foundational LLM to summarize the reviews)	M (Need the relevant infrastructure and the training data)
	Pull data from newspapers/local news transcripts to check if any issue has happened recently	M (This will be nice to have to see local reports from the area where you will be staying)	L (Will need to pull in from multiple sources and currently, the data itself is not that available for training)
Not able to find good places to eat	Ask your host/other guests what were some of the good places they ate at	S (Asking your host is available even now)	None
	Summarize Google reviews of the best places based on the itinerary	L (Not everyone reviews on Google. People prefer Yelp in the US for eg. but Google is available everywhere)	M (Should be able to leverage Gemini for this)
	Summarize Yelp/ other local reviews of some restaurants	L (Yelp is great in the US, but each country has its own restaurant discovery product, so pulling from the relevant ones will be nice)	L (Logistical issue because if we are launching this worldwide, we will have to integrate with multiple service providers)

Hence, the recommendation would be to implement the following :

Upload your itinerary and get recommendations based on the closest AirBnBs (Google Maps Integration)
Summarize reviews of the place from other AirBnB guests (Foundational Model such as GPT)
Summarize Google reviews of the best places based on the itinerary (rely on a Gemini API)

Step 5 - Metrics

We can rely on the following metrics :

The % of people who have booked AirBnBs via the itinerary
The ratings of people who booked via the itinerary

Step 6 - Summarize

We were looking at adding a feature that would be useful to AirBnB users, with the caveat that it should include a third party API. We decided that we would look at the app for the guest user flow. In the journey we identified the following pain points.

How far is the AirBnB from various points in my itinerary?
How safe is the area where I am staying?
It is very confusing to understand the best place to get a local shopping experience
Unable to find good places to eat

We brainstormed solutions and came up with the following recommendations

Upload your itinerary and get recommendations based on the closest AirBnBs (Google Maps Integration)
Summarize reviews of the place from other AirBnB guests (Foundational Model such as GPT)
Summarize Google reviews of the best places based on the itinerary (rely on a Gemini API)

To assess the performance of the feature, we will look at the following metrics

The % of people who have booked AirBnBs via the itinerary
The ratings of people who booked via the itinerary