Facebook decides to enter the travel market. As a PM how would you design a product?

Social travel product for FB. 

Clarifying Questions

• Would this be another product offered on the platform? Like Marketplace or would it be imbedded in events?

• Would the purpose be to enable facebook as a means to plan travel with your friends, book flights, hotel stays as a group, plan group itineraries, and memorialize those events within FB?

• Would FB have their own arrangements with hotels/airlines or are you thinking about just a traveling tool?

• I think this would tie into FB’s principle of bringing people together

• Would this be something you would want to provide some age-gates around for security purposes? And how do you invision that working as you can sign up for a FB account without verifying you are the age you say you are?

• Would it be for national or international traffic?

• Are we looking to leverage functionality that exist with FB events?

• What are the business objectives for this product?

  • So our North Start is to increase engagement of existing members, a means for them to plan 

BUS Framework

• Business Objectives

• User problems

• Solutions

ID Users

FB users 18 + if making plans (negative -- how do we ensure this?)

Not country specific

User Problem

• So as a user I might want to travel with friends on Facebook and be able to plan that event online with other travelers within my group.

  • This would cut down on the need for countless calls, organization among friends. And would take the burdon off the one person in the group who would typically be responsible for making plans for the whole group.

• This would also potentially offer that group certain rates that might not be available to them if they traveled alone.

• This would also be a means to share photos/videos from that event in a place where everyone who attended could join.

• It would be an easy way for the group to settle upon things to do once they are at their destination.

• It would also be an oppt for FB to offer up certain ads/recommendations relevant to that locale.

• Take your girls trip scenario -- someone flakes, others within the group need to adjust. Has ruined friendships.

• There could be some pre-packaged experiences for frequently planned events. This would help ease planning difficulty and could also be a source of inspiration and excitement for the users when planning their events?

• FB has many of these tools already imbedded on the platform but they are not altogether in one place. This app could offer up that functionality: i.e., events, marketplace and groups.

Solutions

• It’s a new product

• A few friends have an idea to travel together.

• A group of friends have an event coming up, let’s say graduation.

• They sign into FB. There is an FB Travel icon on the right ribbon of their FB page.

• They sign in to create a potential plan and invite their travelers to sign into that travel event.

• They can choose between some templates of type of travel plans or choose to go their own way.

• Friends are signed into FB travel. They can book their flights together/get cheaper rates

• As time goes back they return to the site to see things to do in that city?

• They return to the site to see great places to eat in that location?

• They can use polls to collectively vote on things to do, places to see, eat

• They return to that site to take virtual tours of that location.

• During trip.

• They post photos and videos to their travel group.

• Post trip.

• They share their trip with friends/family.

• They share those photos video with family and friends.

• They return to that group to remember the trip they shared.

So we would prioritize groupsharing of events and group planning as part of our MVP

And introduce the group booking features as a fast follow as it would take some more time.

The tradeoffs.

Without the group booking feature, we are not really serving up a whole lot of user excitement.

Most things can be achieved within the portal via making ad hoc groups or even events.

In fact, I am not sure if this product can stand alone as a complete experience without the group booking component.

Group booking via FB if successful could really disrupt the whole travel app marketplace.

Break it down into specifics. User Journey

User sees FB trips on ribbon.

Clicks on ribbon.

Plans an event.

Chooses to plan theirs from scratch or use a template

User receives discount on plus 20 travel.

User invites others to Trips -- event.

Other users sign in, agree on travel location.

Navigate available accommodations. Chooses accommodations.

Links out/widget w/in portal to take virtual tour of possible accommodations.

User can see reviews of things to do at that location.

Users can book things to do within portal.

Travelers can vote on selections/therefore planning together and staying engaged.

Burden of travel is taken off one person.

During travel, user can be prompted to post to travel as well as news feed.

All user photos/videos are shared within  one place.

FB creates a montage of everything that was done on their trip.

Post travel

User shares their experience with their family/friends.

Users remember their experiences with each other.

User plans additional group events via FB trips.

User revisits trip annually (like Birthdays) or memories.

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

You asked me what I would build as the PM for Facebook Travel.

The way I think about Facebook Travel is that it enables Facebook's users to engage with people around the world, get to see and experience new places and culture, and maybe make new friends. This is directly related to FB's mission.

Restate

Did you have any specific direction you would like me to think about the FB travel product? When you say social travel product, is this something built within Facebook platform or a standalone app?

When you are looking to launch this, are you targeting a particular user group? Or a particular geography?

Can i ask what the motivation is, behind this? Have there been any preliminary data to indicate that there is a need for this product?

Does it have to be any different from other travel apps out there? Like - Tripit etc?

Social - lets qualify this - it means, something that enables connections, companionship, meaning interactions etc.

Travel - lets qualify this - this could be domestic/internation travel for vacation, office commute, business trips.

Interviewer: you can make your own assumptions.

Ok.  Lets proceed with the following assumptions:

1. Its part of the FB app, and it's a US based launch at the start. We will launch via an A/B to our identified demographic.

This is how I plan to approach the problem.

• Think about Travel and what it means to users
• What are the different user segments for this product
• User cases and pain points
• Brainstorm ideas for the pain points
• Final set of prioritized ideas

Users have travelled for 100s of years but in the last 10 years traveling has picked up due to the ease of discovering places, online booking and the reduction of air fare of the years (race to the bottom). To an extent there is too much information (places to go), ways to book now that might overwhelm busy folks who are trying to book a trip without a trusted travel agent.

I would like to take a minute to think about user segments:

The user segments I can think of are as follows:

1. Young travelers. - These could be young workers / university students who are seeking an adventure locally/internationally. These traveler's are price sensitive, and might be willing to spend the time to find the best deal.
2. Families with kids - parents with multiple kids who want to have a kid friendly vacation, as well as would like to avail of some kid friendly facilities - shared rides, car seat rentals etc. This is the busiest segment that has the least amount of time to plan a vacation/deal with trip interruptions.
3. Retirees - These are older people who might sometimes be single travellers and want to travel in a group to areas of historical significance or culture. They tend to be more price agnostic and are able to take longer trips.

Lets focus on Families with Kids for the purpose of our discussion. Some of the key pain points for a family booking a vacation are as follows:

1. Finding a kid friendly, safe place to stay
   1. Some considerations here are food prep especially if the kids are sensitive to any allergens, stroller friendliness, location safety
2. Activities during the trip
   1. Some considerations here are what are kid friendly activities, how long would they take, how far from where the family is staying, local parks / activities. Local experiences
3. Post trip memory organization
   1. Ensuring that all of the memories from the trip are edited, archived shared with family and friends.

Out of these  #3 is an area where FB currently does a good job with helping with tagging of photos and sharing with group, and any changes would be an incremental ad. Same with # 1 - this could be incremental filters on the FB Local search experience

For the purpose of this discussion I would like to focus on #2 - Activities during the trip as this expands the pie for Facebook and could potentially open up a new payments based revenue stream for FB long term.

Vision

I envision the FB Travel to be a FB travel concierge that will enable people to a)book trips, b) complete a trip and c(share their memories seamlessly. In 5 years - you could imagine FB / IG having the ability to create videos based on all of the trips a user has taken to create a living movie on a user's journey through their travel. For eg - through AI FB Travel could show a user their paddle-boarding adventures through the years in different locations.

Solutions

I am going to pause for a minute to brainstorm some ideas for solutions for the FB Travel concierge product targeted at "Families with kids".

1. Provide a list of activities organized by age group and reviews
2. Provide a list of trusted businesses that offer activity with reviews
3. Provide users a simple way to interact with businesses and book activities
4. Provide users the ability to get memories from the businesses during activity
5. Provide users the ability to get memories from other users during activity
6. Ability to join a local parents group to hear about local attractions.
7. Provide an itinerary builder once a user has selected activities

Out of all of these I would like to focus on #1 as it is the start on the funnel and helps get a user to the consideration phase thinking about what activities they might want to go ahead and try out. The list should be able to provide rich meta data like videos on the activity both professional (business provided) or user sourced, reviews and key highlights.

One a user gets to the consideration phase #2 and #3 the user can leverage FB's existing communication tools What's App / Messenger to interact with the business and complete a transaction.

To summarize, we discussed the following:

Building a FB Travel concierge that will help FB users experience the world at large and connect with the global community. We will focus on the Families with Kids user segment at the start, and specifically provide these families with the tools to consider activities per age group, and then interact with local businesses to book the activity. Finally FB will help the user consolidate memories from the user, other participant and the business in a privacy aware seamless manner.

Core Metrics:

• # of user that interact with the activity feed
• # of activities booked
• Activity feedback review posted by the user
• # of activities added to the itinerary per user

Risks/Pitfalls:

• Businesses are not actively engaged on the activity feed
• Parents are sensitive about providing ages of children/booking with small business providers pre trip.
• Feed hygiene - is the business data feed quality good?