Approach to the product improvement question 

1. Describe your understanding of the product, features, users and business model of the company (revenue generation)

2. Clarify with interviewer whether he has any expectation on

• Any Specific Pain Point to address

or

• Is it to improve an existing feature
• Add a new feature to improve the product overall
• Improve a platform (Web/Mobile)
• Improve a particular segment of Users?
• Improve a company goal: Brand, Revenue, User Aquisition, Traffic

• State what you see as the BIG pain point

3. Identify the use case to BIG PAIN POINTS or which have BIG IMPACT

• Usecase
• Solution
• Value to the customer (High/medium/low)
• Development/deployment Complexity (High/Medium/Low)

4. Prioritise the Usecase/Solution

5. Explain how to measure the success criteria related to the feature you described

6. Wrap Up – Impact to the Goal, Alternate Solutions, Self-Assessment – Problems with existing solutions

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1. Describe your understanding of the product, features and the users

Google Map helps users

1.  Suggests an optimal route to move from Point A to Point B using various transportations.

2. Helps in searching various point of interests with ratings and location address

3. Automatic Re-Routing and alternative route suggetions

4. Rate a place

The Company generate revenue via – Advertisement on their platform

The Main user segments are – General commuters, Travellers (Tourist, Business travellers), General users searching for Bricks and Motors, private vehicle owners, Bikers, people using ride-sharing Apps etc

Main Pain Point I see is for Traveller who visit new places or countries they have issues related to

1. Clear Guidance in terms of places to visit (Historical, Shopping malls, Pubs, Restaurants)
2. Language – Communication
3. Clear Guidance in terms of places to visit

The Solution

Usecase & Solutions – Google Smart Guide for travellers

Now Google becomes the local guide, the interaction of the user is more with google maps rather than a local person, this eliminates the communication problem due to different language.

Feature development prioritization

The priority will be as per the above table, as the first two needs to be developed before the last point to be achieved, so I start from the first item.

To get user attention: whenever google sense you have travelled abroad/ or far away distance and opens google maps, a Pop-Up nudge is presented of the new features with the top list of places and restaurants to visit during the time he is in. (Google can also use the date, place and time by the flight travel itinerary and plan an itinerary which spans few hours to few days)

Success Criteria: (specific to the feature you are suggesting)

I am assuming, objective of improving Google Maps is to increase user engagement.

To do so, there are a couple of things that we can look at:

1. Improve user interface
2. Add a new feature

I would like to discuss adding a new feature unless you want to discuss improving UI

One feature that I believe would increase unser engagement is having google maps for indoors for malls.

Let’s first discuss why I think this is important than we will discuss the feature in detail

WHY:

It’s daunting for mall visitors to find the store they are looking for because of the huge size of mall and new store constantly opening

WHAT:

For indoor maps to work I can think of following feature in the priority order:

1. collecting mall’s information
2. updating google maps app
3. updating in-mall directory
4. Moonshot – smart notifications

First off, I’d like to outline my understanding of the product to make sure I fully understand all the important elements.  I understand that google maps has a few different use cases

• It provides maps of pretty much the entire world. The maps have various levels of detail, traditional street maps, satellite overlay, and terrain map. It also allows you to look around in 360 with google street view.
• It allows people to navigate places, both on desktop as well as turn by turn navigation while travelling in a car, bike or walking.
• It enables users to search for, discover and find places of interest. Whether that be a business, a restaurant, tourist attraction. Furthermore, it allows users to look at reviews and find out important information about those location like hours of operation. It also has various integrations, such as allowing you to make bookings at restaurants or hotels.

So to summarize, it provides three things

• General mapping
• Navigation
• Discovery, information and interaction with points of interest.

Does that sound right?

Interviewer: Sure that sounds right.

Great.  So, it’s clearly a very big product, and for the purpose of this exercise, I’d like to narrow it down to focus on just one area of the product.  I’d like to focus on improving the point of interest section. However, even within that part of the product that are a lot of different features, so I want to narrow it down even further. I’m going to focus on improving how people interact with the restaurant feature of google maps.  I want to focus on this part of the product for two reasons

1. It’s an area where there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement. A lot of potential upside in terms of functionality.
2. Competitors currently hold a significant market share for restaurant-related searches and interactions. For example, Google is currently losing out on a lot of traffic and engagement to services like Yelp and Foursquare that they could capture with enhanced features on their own platform. This is a big missed opportunity for Google.

Does that sound good?

Interviewer: Sure, let’s do it!

Okay, great. Next, I’d like to focus on a metric to move through this.  I definitely think we should be focusing on engagement here. When I think through the main categories of metrics (acquisition, activation, engagement, and monetization), Google has already acquired and activated a huge portion of the market.  That is, almost everyone has looked at a restaurant on Google Maps at some point in their lives. However, a lot of people (perhaps even the majority of people) still go to products like Yelp, and Foursquare for restaurant discovery and reviews, they go to Opentable for reservations and places like Doordash and Postmates for delivery. They could be doing all of that on Google maps. Therefore I want to focus on increasing the engagement. Broadly, our goal is to increase the frequency that people engage with google maps. Specifically, I would measure this by looking at the number of monthly active users who make at least one search for restaurants on Google maps on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I’d also want to increase the average number of searches per user on a monthly basis.

I also find it helpful to focus product improvement efforts on a specific user group.  Broadly speaking, we can segment users in terms of how often they’re already using the restaurant features of google maps.  On the high end we have people that are already engaging with it really frequently, let’s call them ‘power users’. On the low end we have people that aren’t engaging with it at all. Let’s call them inactive users’. Then in the middle, we have people that are engaging with occasionally. Maybe they’ve played around with it a bit, but they’re not using it as their primary go-to for the types of searches and value that it can provide.  Let’s call them occasional users. I want to focus on increasing engagement among that middle segment. The occasional user of google’s reach data around points of interest.

Does that sound good?

Interviewer: Sounds great.

Great.  So next what I’d like to do is think about some pain points and problems that users are currently facing. Do you mind if I  take a minute or so to think of some?

To start with, I’ve mapped out the user journey for someone going out to eat at a restaurant. It looks like this:

• Decide to go out for dinner
• Find an appropriate restaurant
• Coordinating with others.
• Make a reservation (or recommending when to arrive if it’s walk-in only)
• Choose the best meal
• Eat
• Provide a review
• Share what they’ve eaten with others on social media

Now I’ll think about some pain points in that user journey. I’ll also prioritize them based on 1) impact to user 2) impact on engagement

So based on this prioritization, I’m going to pick the following 2, which were rated as high impact on the user

• Being overwhelmed by choice when choosing a restaurant.
• Deciding on what food to order.

Now I’m going to come up with some solutions for each of these pain points. Please give me a couple of minutes to come up with them

One of google’s competitive advantages and core competencies is in building algorithms that incorporate multiple data sources to rank order things by preference. That’s what search is all about.  So why not apply these to the user pain points we identified.

Choosing a restaurant. 

1. Selection of top three restaurants you should try next based on prior selections and trending restaurants
2. Showing if your friend went to the restaurant and what they rated it as.
3. Showing most popular restaurants in area in general

Deciding what dish to order

4. Suggest dishes based on prior dishes you’ve ordered and ratings by other people. For example, right now google maps shows you popular dishes, we could easily take this one step further and highlight 1-2 items and say “recommended for you”, and even put a match amount on it.
5. Have people fill out a questionnaire where they answer a bunch of questions, and then get restaurant and dish recommendations based on that. You could even have email program and push notification if there’s a new restaurant or dish that has a strong match for your preferences.
6. Show dishes your friends have ordered or rated highly and what they rated it as.
7. Show most popular dishes at the restaurant.

So I’ve identified 7 possible solutions. I’m immediately going to cross off a few here that I don’t think are worth.  Most popular dishes and most popular restaurants already feature I believe. So no point looking further there. Also, option 5 (have people fill out a questionnaire to identify preferences) is more an implementation detail of option 1 and 4 (recommend top restaurants and dishes), so I’ll merge this into those solutions.

So that leaves me with 5 solutions that I’ll rate on two dimensions: 1) impact on engagement and 2) level of effort to build

So based on the prioritization, I would choose to focus first on showing people the top three restaurants to try, because it had high impact and medium effort to build. As part of this solution, we can also implement the questionnaire/profile to determine people’s preferences for restaurants and food.

Finally, I want to look at how I would measure success post-launch.  I would look at

1. Total number of restaurant searches per month
2. The median number of restaurant searches per active user per month.

Both of these would give me an idea for whether this feature is driving engagement.

So to summarize the full exercise:

• I’d focus on improving engagement within the restaurant feature of google maps.
• I identified two major pain points: 1) Being overwhelmed by choice when choosing a restaurant and 2) deciding what food to order.
• I identified 6 solutions, and narrowed it down to one: Building out an algorithm to match restaurants to user’s preferences, and then displaying the top 3 recommended restaurants.
• I would measure success by looking at two metrics: 1) Total number of restaurant searches per month 2) Median number of restaurant searches per active user per month

Here is my approach to this Google product improvement PM job interview question. There are eight steps in the framework:

1. Describe Google Maps – Google Maps allows user to go from Point A to Point B efficiently and provides several commute options such as driving, walking, public transport, and even like to ride sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft. User also uses Google Maps to search nearby places such as restaurants, gas stations, events, and things to do.
2. Ask Clarifying Questions from the Interviewer –
   1. Is the goal to improve the entire platform or a specific feature?
   2. Is the improvement channel specific – Web or Mobile?
   3. What’s the objective of improvement? – engagement, increase in revenue, acquisition. etc.
3. Once interviewer provides clarification to above question, I would start by first laying out the approach I am going to take to (a) start by understanding who are users (personas) of Google Maps are, (b) Pick one persona and what their goals or motivations are when using Google Maps. (c) Then I will identify pain points (user needs) and suggest new features/ solutions to increase customer satisfaction leading to better customer engagement (d) next, I will prioritize new features based on cost vs benefit, (e) Lastly I will summarize the overall analysis
4. Users of Google Maps
   1. Private vehicle owners
   2. Bikers
   3. Commuters using public transport
   4. Walkers
   5. Tourists
   6. People using ride sharing app like Uber, Lyft etc.
5. I am going to pick commuters using public transport such as train, bus, subways to go from point A to point B. Commuters hate when there is interruption is services that could be because of trains running late, major breakdown, change in train timing and route. People don’t like waiting even if the train or bus is late by couple of minutes. Also not all train and bus stations are same when it comes to amenities such as access to elevators, public bathrooms, and information booth. Commuters such as old age people, family traveling with infants, and physically challenged people need these information in advance to plan their trip efficiently.
6. Considering the above pain points that I just mentioned, here are few feature/ use cases that Google Maps can offer to delight the commuters
   1. Personalized real-time notification to commuter when there is interruption in the service (this is especially useful to people commuting daily say from home to office and back). Google knows some very vital information about the commuter like at what time they start from home, from which station they take train, what time they head back home. These information can be used to send real-time train/bus service alert to commuter, so that they can prepare in advance, say may look for alternate route of mode of transportation.
   2. Book uber/ lyft for commuter, to the nearest alternate train/bus station, so that they can reach their destination on-time.
   3. Train/ bus station information catalog showing all amenities and contact information. The catalog should get updated on regular interval,. So that commuter is aware of the change say elevator at station X is going through periodic maintenance
   4. Collaboration platform that will categorize station based on people input on incidents such as number of theft, people fallen on track, people got stuck in between train and platform, or even broken machine. This will make people self-aware and will tell them to ride safe.
7. Now, I will prioritize the solutions across the user goal and complexity of development. The user’s goals is to reach from point A to point B efficiently with most up to date information.

8. From the table, the two features that provide the highest impact for the lowest effort are (a) personalized real-time notification and (b) Information catalog. My recommendation would to start with these two solutions while also start brainstorming on building collaborative feature with in Google Maps as this will definitely change the way people see and use Google Maps today.