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How would you increase the revenue of MS Powerpoint?

  • Related to Estimation
  • For Platform PM
  Microsoft
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Answers (2)
How would you increase the revenue of MS Powerpoint?
Clarify (5W, 1H)
  • What – Define product (Microsoft powerpoint)
    • Powerpoint is a tool that helps users (various personas) to present ideas, thoughts in meetings; where speaker can share a visualization (text, picture, multimedia etc.) to audience.
  • Where
    • Are we focussing on any specific market (geography)? globally
    • Are we focussing on any platform (web apps, mobile app, web)? Are all of them monetized? web app & office 365 is a paid product. App is free (in app purchase)
  • why
    • Why do we want to increase the revenue? Goal – increase Monetization
  • who
    • Who are the user personas? Defined below
  • when
    • NA
  • How – How user buy this product?
    • Can user buy powerpoint alone or as a bundle? currently, you buy it as a bundle w/ Office suite or Office365.
Formula:  Revenue = average order price (aop) * # of qty sold (Q)
  • To increase revenue i can focus on increase either aop or Q
Identify user/customer personas
Office (Working Professionals)
  1. Corporate Sales Reps [offline usage] – to present in front of clients [focus more on text & images, lightweight videos/animations]
  2. corporate employees [online usage] – who work in collaboration with teams
  3. Ad Agencies / Graphic heavy users – to create artwork & display innovation for design
Home
  1. Students – to make notes, share reports & homework assignments
  2. General Purpose – Digital content user, Internet Surfer / General PPT (multimedia usage)
Strategies to increase revenue

 

  • increase APRU per user (since office 365 is a subscription-based product focus on up sell/ cross sell – we can think of services that can help above user simplify there needs. for example sales reps can have presentation ideas to make ppt quickly, working professional can collaborate faster)
    • Focus on al-a-carte based
  • Increase LTV per user (retain users > extended revenue)
  • expand to new user personas (which product is not currently focussing on)
    • focus on growing products to similar industry like marketing banners, ads, photographers who are not pros at photoshop and can quickly get the job done from powerpoint.
  • grab users from competitors (revenue from new users)
    • Focus on al-a-carte based bundling so that users can try powerpoint.
  • Focus on tier-based pricing (for various personas)
    • students can be an early users in there lifecycle; but can be retained for longer – hence can be sold products at discounted rates.
    • Try variation with smaller subscriptions (monthly, quarterly) to showcase products (on trial basis)
  • Segmentation & marketing to user based on there stages
    • new user, inactive, active, power user. Push user to next level via engagement campaigns.

I believe the estimation question here is not about describing the metrices, rather it is more on improvig the product and suggesting new features/ product improvement focusing upon the revenue or monetization metrics. I would approach this problem in following manner:

  1. Clarify:
    • do we have any specific channel (mobile, desktop) that we want to improve or focus upon
    • are we focusing upon any specific use case/ geo location which has been recently launched
    • Assuming we want to take a generic case and increase the overall revenue
  2. Application Definition: MS powerpoint is a tool which is used to createpresentations and visual content which can be used by the creator to present to an audience or transfer to same for expressing his thoughts/ viewpoints
  3. Users:
    • Students: use it to create assignments, study material or presentations for important topics
    • Teachers: to prepare lectures
    • Sales/ Business Developers: use it to create sales presentation which can be presented to a client
    • Consultants: to create presentations for providig strategic inputs to the clients
  4. Choose one persona to focus upon and expand use case for them which can be monetized:
    • Ex: Lets deep dive Sales Professionals persona: they use powerpoint to create:
      • Sales pitch creation
      • to collborate betwee teams for finalizing their deck or presentation material
      • to gather feedback
      • to transfer their sales pitch to prospective clients
  5. Lets choose some use cases basis: Revenue Potential, User Value
    • Sales Pitch Creation: High Revenue Potential, High User Value
    • Collaborate: Low Business Potential, Medium User Value
    • Feedback: Low, Medium
    • Transfer: High, High
  6. Basis this lets expand the Sales Pitch creation and feedback use case and explore some ideas like:
    • Sales Pitch Template: make a help corner and present various templates to choose users can buy templates they can use
    • Share on LinkedIn: add feature to allow users to share their decks with potential clients over linkedin
    • Expert Corner: Create a powerpoint community (like github) where users ca share their decks:
      • to gather feedback
      • to take help from other’s templates
  7. If we evaluate above ideas on : revenue potential, user value and ease of implementation metric we can see Sales Pitch Template to be 1st implementation then Share on Linkedin and then Expert Corner
  8. Summarize: We would want to explore new use cases and create a template corner which can be used by users to purchase requried templates starting with focus on sales professionals