Elevating Experiences: Airbnb’s Next Chapter in Adventure

You are the product manager for Airbnb Experiences. What goals will you set for your team? What north star goal will you use?

Related to Estimation
For Generalist PM

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Answers (3)

Dianne Stinger

What is Airbnb expereinces: Instead of only searching for hotels at a location, user wants to explore experiences at that location e.g. evening in paris, stargazing in finland etc.

User segments: Hosts & Guests

We will focus on Guests (persona: solo travellers / existing customers)

Goal: Increase experiences – Increase in airbnb expereinces booking.

North star: #of airbnb experience bookings/MOM

Risk: 1. Cancellations (supply) of expereinces, Technical glitches, Seasonality

* the ones in BOLD below are prioritized list of metrics based on impact to customer and end goal.

Actions	Measure	Pain points
Search for experiences	1. #. of experiences searched / # of visits 2.Avg. Scroll depth	Unable to discover experiences, Not eneough experiences show up. Wrong search results not what customer expected, Unable to click search
Click& Book Exp	1. Avg #of bookings /user/MOM 2. CTR rate 3.successful payment processign rate 4. Accepted by hosts/Booking requests	Click disabled, not able to book, payment failure, not accepted by hosts for those dates
Post booking experience	1. #avg cancellations post booking 2. #customer support tickets 3. #Events/ experiences getting cancelled 4. 30 day return on experiences
Rating and Review	1. NPS 2. #Avg rating per experience 3. #referral rate 4. #avg no of shares

Bobby Duncan

Clarify

Before we start I want to ask some clarifying questions

What are Airbnb Experiences?

To make sure we are on the same page, my understanding of Airbnb experiences is that it’s a way for Airbnb customers to experience different activities based on a location they are traveling to. For example, if you are vacationing in Hawaii you can get surfing lessons, do a walking tour, or see an artistic performance. People tend to book these experiences when they are traveling. It’s also not a requirement book a rental with AirBnb in order to book an experience.

When a customer books an experience, the person running the experience (Experience Creator) gets a cut of the profits and AirBNB also gets a share. These experiences can be booked through the mobile app or the website.

Who do we want to target as a user group?

Let’s assume everyone

What is the stage of the product?

Let’s assume the product has been out for several years now (present time)

Do we want to target any specific geographical location?

For sake of example, let’s assume it’s only in the USA.

Now that I know a bit more about what AirBnB experiences entail, I want to talk a little bit about the stake holders.

AirBnB is very much a two sided market place, where the demand is the customer looking for an experience and the supply is the experience creator who creates and host the experience.

Customer: This is someone that is traveling and wants to a book and try a local experience at their destination.

Experience creator: This is someone who creates and host a local experience.

Now I want to set a quick high level goal that will help me dig into the correct metric.

Goal of Airbnb experiences: Offer local experience to customers so they may better enjoy their travel destination.

Great, now that I have a better understand of what Airbnb Experiences are, the stakeholders/user, and we have a goal. I would like to go through the following:

Write out the customer journey for each user type (Customer and the Experience Creator)
Map some relevant metrics to each user type
Evaluate the trade-offs between each metric I listed to see which one best aligns with our goal
Summarize my solution

List customer journey and relevent metrics

Customer

[New User] Sees an ad for an AirBnb experience, clicks on ad
[New User] Create an account
[New User] Books an AirBnB experience
[Existing user] Goes on Airbnb to book a place to rent
1. Or user books an activity first, then attempt to rent out a place
2. Or gets an email about an Airbnb Experiences, clicks on the email
Does a search for Airbnb Experiences at his travel destination
Looks through activities in their search results
Selects an activity and books
1. Decided not to book an activity
If user booked an activity, they will fly/drive to their destination and go through the activity
Afterwards leave a review
Books an another experience down the line
Refers an experience to a friend

AARM – Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetization, Referal

Awareness

# of ad impresses (for new users)

# of existing users who view experience email (existing users)

Acquisition

# of users who land on the experience page

# of users who did a first time search for experience

Activation

# of users who made an account on Airbnb

# of users who booked booked an experience for the first time

Retention

# of searches for experiences (w/w)

# of users who booked an experience (w/w)

# of users who come back and book a second experience

Monetization

Revenue generated through experiences

Average cost of an experience

Average amount of revenue per user who booked at least one experience

Referral

# of referral/recommendation

% of users that recommend an experience

% of users who book a rental -> experience

% of users who book an experience -> rental

Experience Creator

Previous users that have their property of for rent get an email about experiences
They click on the email to get more information
Experience creator comes up with an idea, submits it to Airbnb for approval
If accept, I assume that the creators must go through an onboarding process to get their experience listed
Once onboarding is complete, experience creator marks their experience as “Live” and sets availability date on AirBnB
Customer book a slot
Customers show up to experience and experience creator guides them through it
Experience is finished, Experience Creator gets left a review
Experience creator leaves a review for the customer (not sure if this is possible or not)
Expereince creator gets paid (Airbnb also cutes a cut)
Creator contineus to host experience

AARM – Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetization, Referal

Awareness

# number of renters who click on experience email

Aquistion

# of people who submitted an idea

Activiation

# of people who list an experience

Retention/Engagement

# number of experiences offered

# number of experience booked (w/w)

% of experiences creators that drop out

Fill-rate of an experiences creators availbitily.

Average review left for an experience

Monitization

Amount of money paid to experience creators

Average amoutn of money earned per month per creator

Referall

(Covered in Customer)

Airbnb (Company)

Monetization

$ of money earned from experiences (Month/Month)

Average amount of $ earned from each creator (Month/Month)

Evaluate trade offs

In order to evaluate and narrow down our metrics, I would like to revisit the goal I selected above

Goal of Airbnb experiences: Offer local experience to customers so they may better enjoy their travel destination.

So now we need a metric that let’s us know that users are booking experience and that they are also having a good time.

Thus I would select the following North Star Metric:

Number of experiences booked where the customer left a positive review (4 stars or more) vs experiences with less then steller reviews (3 or less stars) as both an absolute number and a percentage.

This gives us a good sense of how many users are booking experience and are having a positive experience compare to lack luster experiences.

As secondary metrics I would look at the following:

1. The fill rate of experiences. We want to make sure that there enough on the supplpy side to make sure travelers have something to book.

2. % of customer base who book an experience – Gain insights as to how popular experience relative to AirBnb’s main offering (rentals)

3. Revenue generated from experience – Good indications of well expereinces are doing for the business perspective

Summarize

I took a look at Airbnb Experiences to see what would be a good success metric. Being that it’s a two sided market with customers and experiences creators, we went through both their user journeys to get a since of what relevant metrics I could come up with. After listing the metrics and referring back to the goal, I came up with the following north start metric:

Number of experiences booked where the customer left a positive review (4 stars or more) vs experiences with less then steller reviews (3 or less stars) as both an absolute number and a percentage.

This will help us track the total number of booked experiences and also breakdown the quality.

Whitney Chard

Looking for feedback on my approach to this execution interview question:

I’ll start off with asking a few clarifying questions:

1. At what point of time am I the PM for experiences? At launch or after? Assume – after

2. Is this pre-covid or during covid? Assume : during covid

3. Did you have any specific user groups in mind? Assume – all users

4. Any geography? any platform? Assume – global and all platforms

5. Who is in my team? Is it PMs, designers , engineers or combination? assume: all

6. Does my team also include any sales/ GTM/ marketing folks too? Assume: it includes

Great – so quickly restating the problem as “set goal for project team and identify north star metric for experiences re-launch during covid”

I want to make sure I am on the smae page on what the product “experiences” entails before I identify any goals or metrics.

Experiences is a wide variety of tours, events, classes, shows etc. that are unique and offered only through the airbnb platform. Airbnb plays the role of a marketplace where buyers and sellers of experiences interact and complete transactions.

The mission of Airbnb is to ensure people feel that they ‘belong’. Intially it was focused on making sure people feel at home in any place they go to. As an airbnb experience is usually hosted by a local, it made people feel at home and among ‘friends’ with the local hosts. It helped people discover places and things that only locals know and therefore feel like they belong vs. visiting a place as just a tourist. With travel moslty coming to a stand still due to covid, people begin to feel different type of ‘not belonging’ due to social isolation. People feel ‘stuck’ or ‘trapped’ in daily tedium/routine and not able to experience anything new or exciting. The mission of airbnb is still highly applicable in this situation – people now need to feel a sense of beloging in their own homes and find exciting things to do!

Qualitatively, the goal I’d set for the team would still be extending what it was before – ‘make sure people feel a sense of belonging and experience unique things from the comfort of their own homes‘

Next, I’d like to describe the product journeys and user groupsbefore jumping into metrics

buyers log into their airbnb accounts -> explore experiences (search with filters, popular, trending etc.), choose an experience, possibly share and invite friends and then purchase tickets. At the time of the event they login to airbnb and participate in a live event. Upon completion they have the option to rate the event and get recommendations of other events.

sellers sign up (if new), list an experience, upload photos and other creatives, set a price, set availability calander and provide a banking account to get paid.

There is a third user group – airbnb seller support who could potentially need some new tools to support converting offline to online events. They likely need to answer questions, provide suggestion etc. They may already have a lot of these in place but may need some adjustment to existing tools to make sure they work in the online context

Since sellers have a financial incentive, airbnb could potentially convert a lot of the existing sellers to online hosts. I’d like to prioritize buyers as this is a new product paradigm that they need to understand and use.

Since this is similar to a new launch we will need to track all the funnel metrics.

1. Awareness – we bneed to make sure people know that airbnb experiences are now online!

– open rates on emails

– click through rates on notifications

We would have press releases and other outbound marketing activities too which will have their own imapct

2. Acquisition

– # of new sign ups per day

– # of users logins per day

– # of people viewing event details per day

– Amt of time spent on each page view

3. activation & engagement

Want to make sure people are finding things they like to do

– # of users making bookings per day

– % of DAU making a booking each day

-% of MAU with an active booking

– % of completed bookings of total bookings (got through entire event)

– MAU

– DAU

4. retention

Want to make sure people come back and make a booking.

– Avg. # of bookings per person

– Weekly, monthly retention rate (retention defined as making a booking)

5. Monetization

– Avg. valueof transaction

– ddaily total revenue

6. marketplace health

– ratio of sellers with active bookings to toal sellers

– ratio of buyer to seller

As stated, our goal is to make sure people feel a sense of belonging against the isolating experience of the pandemic and find exciting things to do, the north star metric for me points to people succeeding in that – i.e., people finding something they participate in – % of MAU with active bookings. Of course it is important to make sure there is broad interest so MAU and DAU would be my secondary metrics.

Summarizing – We would relaunch experiences by going virtual. Our goal would be to make sure people can find exciting things to do from their own home. We would track % of MAU with active booking to make sure people are actually doing achieving this goal on our platform.