Google Maps: plan multi-day trips and itineraries

Design a trip planning and itinerary feature inside Google Maps to capture long-distance travel engagement.

Context

Travellers plan across blogs, spreadsheets, booking sites and saved lists. Maps is used heavily during the trip but rarely for planning it.

Clarifying questions to ask first

Goal: planning engagement, bookings or retention?
Solo, couples or groups?
Do we include bookings?

How to approach it

Clarify the business goal and tie the product to the company's mission before touching solutions
Segment users by behaviour or need (not just age), cover the whole ecosystem, and pick one segment with explicit criteria
Walk the end-to-end journey and separate real pain points from feature requests
Brainstorm a range of solutions (quick fix, data/ML, moonshot) and prioritise with impact vs effort
Define a North Star, funnel metrics and guardrails, then call out risks, edge cases and mitigations

Framework: Goal & mission -> Ecosystem & segment choice -> Journey & pain points -> Solutions & prioritisation -> Metrics & guardrails -> Risks & edge cases

Sample answer

Detailed planners, spontaneous travellers, group organisers
Decision fatigue and scattered information are the core pains
Maps already has places, reviews and travel times

Solutions: day-by-day plan built from saved places with realistic travel times, AI draft itinerary to edit, shareable group plans, offline trip pack
Metrics: North Star = trips with an itinerary used during travel; guardrails = itinerary abandonment, satisfaction

A day-by-day planner from saved places with real travel times and group sharing. Measure itineraries used on the trip.

What interviewers look for

Clear goal (planning engagement vs bookings)
Planner vs on-trip journey
Decision fatigue
Ecosystem (partners, creators)