Build a product for group travel.

Question

Build a product for group travel.

Asked at Google in the past year

703 views

Product Design category

Asked at

703 views

How to answer Product Design questions

Interview Guide

Top Product Design interview questions

How would you design a web search engine for children below 14 years old?36 answers | 42.9k views
Design a library for the future.25 answers | 23.5k views
How would you design a consumer application for a scooter sharing business?21 answers | 18.6k views
See Product Design PM Interview Questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

Ujjwald · Answer 1 · 2024-06-24T04:34:07+0000

Step 1 - Clarifications

Are we building this as part of the Google ecosystem, or are we a startup just starting out?

Any specific reason that we are building this? Any overarching objectives or some feedback that we received?

Is there a specific group size we are looking at?

For now, I will assume we are building this as part of the larger Google ecosystem for a group size of about 5-6 people.

Step 2 - Segment users and choose one

If we look at casual travellers (business travellers probably have someone doing the booking for them so we focus on casual travellers), we have the following segments.

Below 18 years old
18-30 year olds
31-50 year olds
Over 50 years old

For the purposes of this question, I will look at building something for the 18-30 year olds. This is because this is the demographic that really loves travelling and exploring the world. As this is a new product we will need a segment that will adapt to this as well and this is a good place to start. If we look at some of the attributes of this segment,

This group loves travelling and are exploratory
They are also cost conscious but love new experiences

Step 3 - Identify and prioritize pain points

If we look at the journey of how group travel works, a group of friends decide on a place, then they get an itinerary (either through research or through a travel agent which includes the cost, stays, places to go around), then the tickets get booked, the travel to the destination, site seeing and eating at the local place, and come back.

Now, I am looking to identifying a pain point in that journey.

Pain Point	Current Solution	Severity
Deciding on a place is a pain (too many options and each one has their own view)	Happens offline via Whatsapp/iMessage/calls	M
Even after selecting a place, building an itinerary with so many people's inputs can get confusing	No solution as such. Everyone sits with a travel agent or goes through an aggregator like Expedia atc.	L
Getting a mutually agreeable date for the travel is difficult	Happens offline via Whatsapp/iMessage/calls	S
Where can i find the cheapest flights/stays	Google Flights / AirBnb	S
Finding the most cost effective transport from A->B	Google Maps	S

From the above, I would like to focus on the pain point of actually building an itinerary.

Step 4 - Identify and prioritize solutions

Solution	Reach	Impact	Effort
Invite people on Google Maps to enter where they want to go	M (Not many will be interested because they don't really know where to go)	M (Not many people would know what to enter. People who know will have to do secondary research anyway)	S (Just entering names of places on existing architechture)
Based on patterns of other travellers, generate a tourist itinerary	L ( A lot of people will find this helpful)	L (People will find this helpful as it gives them a good startpoint)	L ( You will need a new model that will train on people's tourist destinations. You can mark a certain individual as a tourist if he/she is there for a short period of time and visits very rarely/only once)
Use Gemini to generate an itinerary of places and give them the option to push that to Google Maps to generate the route maps and what can be done on a daily basis	L (People will find this helpful)	L (People will find this helpful)	M (You can use the Gemini APIs but you will need to build an interface on maps that integrates this experience. You can also recommend hotels based on where most of these places are)
Have good local restaurants on the route	M (Food is something that happens once you are there and not at the itinerary stage)	M (Food is something that happens once you are there and not at the itinerary stage)	S (See the best rated restaurants on the map in a given area. This is already available as part of the Places API)
Share the itinerary with everyone and ask them to review/make edits	M (A lot of the casual travellers don't know much and will say ok to everything)	M (Not that big of an impact)	M (Itinerary once created can be shared relatively easily)
Share reviews of all items on the intinerary	L (A lot of people will use this to prioritize)	L (A lot of people will find this useful, especially the casual travellers)	M (You can summarize reviews off Google for each place on the itinerary to help them)
Have a section on emergency contacts	L (In case of an emergency how to contact local law enforcement / emergency services)	L (A separate section with details from fellow travellers can do thi)	S (Gemini APIs should be able to do this)
Allow others to reject/add certain places	M (Not a lot of people would edit this)	L (Those who do like to finalize and review will have things to say about this)	M (Not much effort as it is just editing the library)

Based on the above, I would like to focus on the following features:

Itinerary Generation - Based on patterns of other travellers, generate a tourist itinerary and push that itinerary to Google Maps
Summarizing reviews - Provide the group with a summary of the reviews that was generated so that they know what they can look forward to
Emergency Contact - Details of local law enforcement along with tips on Dos/Don't Dos
Friendly rejections - Allow friends to reject places and regenerate the itinerary based on that

Step 5 - Risks

If the group doesn't have a good time, Google will be blamed because we generated the itinerary. So those disclaimers need to be given.
Initially, for the LLM use cases, we need to tell them that it is better to do a second review before finalizing the itinerary. We can see how many people come back with a negative review or a rating of the things mentioned there

Step 6 - Metrics

Some of the metrics I would track is

No. of itineraries generated
NPS
No. of people coming back for their second/third itineraries
No. of times people are generating the itineraries before finalizing
No. of people who generate once or twice and never come back

Step 7 - Summarize

We set out to build a product for group travel under the Google brand. We shortlisted the segment 18-30 year olds as the one to focus on because they love travelling, exploring but are also cost conscious. When we looked at their journey and pain points, we thought it would be great to build something to solve the problem of generating itineraries.

Based on the above pain point, we listed solutions and came up with a few features, viz.

Itinerary Generation
Summarizing reviews
Emergency Contact
Friendly rejections

We also identified a couple of risks, viz.

Brand issue if the travellers don't have a good time
LLMs recommending something that isn't great

Finally, when we looked at metrics, we identified a primary metric as the number of itineraries generated but there are a few secondary metric as well.

NPS
No. of people coming back for their second/third itineraries
No. of times people are generating the itineraries before finalizing
No. of people who generate once or twice and never come back

Swathi Manoravi · Answer 2 · 2024-06-02T19:07:01+0000

First I want to understand the business objective and make sure I got the question right.
Are we building this product a Google or some startup ? As a startup

Are we building a software product or a hardware product? Assume a software product

Any particular user group in mind ? No. - Let me park this for later

By Group travel, you mean a group of people travelling together for leisure or for work ? Assume for leisure.

Are we targetting any particular geography ? US initially

Goal : As a for profit startup, my goal is to build an MVP of the product and focus on user Acquisition and engagement.

Now, I will list and proritize the users we are building this product for and then their pain points. Later I would list down solutions, prioritize and then discuss features of the most important solution

USER SEGMENTS:

I want to look at the following common user groups who travel as a group

1. Family groups on family vacation - They are typically a group of families ( 3 or 4 families picking a vacation spot and travelling together.) Can be both budget, mid-range or a luxury vacation. These groups consist of people who are of different age groups and interests. Their ideal vacation goals and activities might not always be aligned.

The same set of families tend to travel together often

Usually these vacations are planned in advance.

2. Friends ( Individuals traveling together )

- Students -> They tend to travel in

- large groups ( 25- 100 )
- small groups. ( <25)
Organized officially by colleges or organized individually.

- adults who are in a well-paid job -> Simialr to students they are typically like minded travelling together. Mostly they are planned quickly or in advance. Their ideal destination types is varies from mid-range to luxury

3. Unknown people traveling together organized by a travel agency

The travel agencies usually have a package. The people select the package that best fits their interest and go on a vacation with unknown people.

4. Travel agencies organizing group travels

They are professionals who has knowledge of the people and their interests to curate general or customized group travel packages. They typically might already have apps/products that can help them in achieving some of their goals.

Of the above user groups, building a product for the Students who travel in Large groups would be more impactful because larger groups usually have higher problems and lots of opinions. Also, considering our business goal of focusing on user Acquisition and engagement, it is easier to acquire these groups by going through their colleges. Because a large number of people will be aware of our product, they can help spread the word.

PAIN POINTS

1. Coming up with a vacation spot might be a problem with 200+ people.
A simple polling can solve this problem
2. Visa for international travel ( colleges do send large groups internationally as well these days ). In colleges with international students, every nationality has different visa requirements for internaltional destinations.
Not a lot of large groups travels are international.
3. How does the travel leader book travel tickets as bulk
Individuals can book for themselves as an alternative
4. Coming up with activities and awareness of when what activity is happening. Booking tickets for activities
  This is an important problem. Activity time & place also changes typically until last minute
5. Sharing and tracking of payment as per small group activity & food.
  This is also important because a lot of people tend to forget to pay. The travel leaders/ whoever paid bills,  end up spending a lot of time following up even after vacation. People loose track of who paid bills of smaller values.
6. Mobility of large groups. How do the large groups travel to different vacation spot ?
Smaller problem, depending on group size the different vehicles can be arranged
7. Group leaders must track every member of large group ensuring they are not lost
  Problem gets bigger as group size increases. Groups of 100+ members are not that common. So, we can solve this post-MVP
9. Organizing and sharing of captured pictures which are in different phones
Big problem. Large groups spend a lot of time organizing and sharing moments post vacation

SOLUTIONS

An app that can solve the above pain points using the following solution

A) Coming up with activities and awareness of when what activity is happening. Booking tickets for activities
1) An AI system that can suggest activities in addition to activities put up by the group.
  - Impactful and difficult to implement. ( AI system must be trained with all spots on the planet )
2) A system that can recommend activities based on other groups going on a similar vacation.
- Impactful and easier to implement. ( need to know only about the history of user groups and the activities they performed ) . Anonymity must be ensured while useing data of other groups to recommend
3) Add group members to the activities chosen based on their interest and notify them on modifications of activity time/date.
- Very Easy to implement.
Booking tickets
4) Integration with places offering those activities
- This could take time to integrate thousands of places. Difficult to implement
5) Purchase tickets offline and track in the app or
- Easy to implement
6) Auto-browse and auto purchase tickets for the activity members based on interest
- Difficult to implement. Product should work with 100% accuracy

B) Sharing and tracking of payment as per small group activity & food.
1) Depending on activities and who pays the bill, split bills among members automatically and keep track of who ows whom how much
- Easy to implement
2) On activities where bills cant be divided equally, assign dollars manually
- Easy to implement
3)  On activities where bills cant be divided equally, Use Computer vision to scan bills and assign line items to individual members
- Difficult to implement
4) Integration with payment systems to ease payments
- Easy to implement. Need to follow regulations when thinking of a payment system.

C) Organizing and sharing of captured pictures which are in different phones
1) Upload photos on  group activity app immediately after taking picture.
- Easy to implement
2) Sync to member's gallery temporarily. Use facial recognition. If a picture with the group member is found, auto upload to our app
- Medium difficulty. But privacy issues
3) On the uploaded pictures, share the pictures to the group member automatically based on facial recognition.
- Medium difficulty but high impact.  ( Facial recognition is becoming commodity ). It is also a Wow feature to attract customers

Based on the prioritization, I would build an app that recommend activities based on other groups going on a similar vacation, notifies group members of different activities and notifies them on change, tracks the purchase of tickets for those activities, split bills among group members based on the activity they participated and keep track of owed amount, upload pictures and notify respective team members if their photo is uploaded.

METRICS
Our goal is to foucs on acquisition and engagement,
-Number of app downloads and % increase month-on-month,
-Number of travels registered and % increase in such registrations ,
-Daily active users
Feature success
-Number of activities and % increase in activities registered.
-Number of photos and % increase in photos uploaded month to month.
-% activities using the split bill feature and how that number grows over time.