Describe a time you used data to change a product decision for Experiences

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Airbnb is a travel marketplace connecting guests and hosts; its products include stays, experiences, host tools, guest booking, trust and safety, payments, and reviews.

Airbnb Experiences connects guests with hosts offering activities, tours, workshops, and local access beyond stays. In this interview, you are being asked to describe a real situation where data helped you challenge, redirect, or reverse a product decision in a marketplace or experience-led product context.

Your story should focus on how you used evidence to influence a product direction, especially where the decision affected supply quality, host success, guest trust, conversion, retention, safety, or marketplace health. The interviewer is looking for how you reasoned through ambiguous data, aligned stakeholders, and translated insights into a better product outcome.

Choose an example where you had meaningful ownership: you identified the issue, gathered or interpreted data, made a case for change, and helped drive the resulting decision. The example does not need to be from travel, but it should be relevant to a two-sided marketplace, creator/host ecosystem, booking flow, or product experience where both customer outcomes and supplier outcomes matter.

The experience should consider:

- What product decision was originally being considered, and why it mattered to users or the business

- What data you used, including quantitative metrics, qualitative research, experiments, support signals, or marketplace health indicators

- How you separated signal from noise, handled incomplete data, or challenged assumptions

- Which users or segments were most affected, such as hosts, guests, new users, power users, or specific geographies

- How you influenced stakeholders who may have been committed to the original direction

- What trade-offs you considered between growth, quality, trust, host supply, operational complexity, and user experience

- What changed in the product decision as a result of your analysis

- What impact followed, and what you learned from the outcome

The goal is to demonstrate product judgment, analytical rigor, ownership, and the ability to use data in service of better user and marketplace outcomes—not just to report metrics, but to change the direction of a product decision in a thoughtful and credible way.