As a PM at Apple, how would you reduce accidents with smartphones?
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Adobe- Rohit Kumar
Assumptions:
- Apple makes a lot of products, but given the question I will assume I am a PM for the ipnone
- Another simplifying assumption is that t he solutionis for US
- Also want to make sure we are on the samepage when we say “accidents” – accidents can be vehicle collisions, people dropping things, falling down etc. For the purpose of this question(and fun 🙂 ) we can define accidents as people dropping their phone
- Also will expand on the definition of ‘reduce’ keeping the end goal in mind. Let’s say that we want to reduce the negative experience of dropping your phone.
So reframe the question as – “How do we make sure users who drop their phones dont have a negative experience?”
Dropping your phone can happen to anyone so this is a common problem. However, a phone is more important to some people than others. Let’s segments users based on what they do which might influence h ow important their phone is for them.
- Office workers
- School/College kids
- Stay at home moms
- Service industry
- Gig workers
- Retired seniors
- Small business owners
For office workers and school/college kids a phone is important but not as important for service industry/gig workers. They have access to other devices and mostly stay at work or school where they have access to the internet and other means of communication. Stay at home moms and seniors also rely on their phone for communication, however if they drop their phone they are not i n an urgent need toreplace it. I’ll create a matrix of user group vs urgency and relative importance to prioritize the user group.
| Office workers | Low | Not urgent |
| School/College kids | Low | Not urgent |
| Stay at home moms | Med | Not urgent |
| Gig workers | High | Urgent |
| Retired seniors | Med | Not urgent |
| Service industry | Med | Not urgent |
| Small business | Med | Not urgent |
I’d like to focus on solutions for gig worker as they rely on their phone heavily for their livlihood and their need is urgent.
Some painpoints:
- Lose access to your gig job accounts
- Lose access to the money earned in those accounts
- Lose photos, contacts
- Unable to do your job as they need their phone for location, maps and accepting gigs
Some solutions:
- Phone replacement insurance program
- Hardware phone protections – eg. phone case that become parachute or airbag for phone
- High end version of phone thats more rugged (like the Nokia 6600)
- A way to emulate your phone on any other internet connected device. Eg,. via a USB plug in
# 1 involves some insurance claim process that does n ot meet user painpoints. As I am a PM on iPhone SW, #2,3 is not in my scope. #4 holds promise but needs feasibility assesment. Expanding on requirements for #4
- HW requirements – Need GPS for location, Wifi connection, battery for portability.
- SW – confirm identity, run gig apps
Assume the solution is a combination of a HW piece that works as a GPS+ 4G hotspot and a Website that once loggedinto ’emulates your phone’.
Using this solution a gig worker could be up and running in a few minutes as long as they have access to a secondary computing device such as a laptop. The solution is supported by a cloud based service that creates a ‘virtual’ version of the phone that the laptop can connect to.
As a first step, I’d work on a prototype to confirm feasibility. Is this solution technically possible? Once feasibility is confirmed, i’d work on a ROI analysis to make sure that the effort and time required to build the solution is realistic given the outcome. Next step would be to develop an MVP for beta users.
Caveats – Not sure if the target market size is worth the effort. I assumed that the need would be immediate, but I’d also validate this assumption to make sure that the solution complexity makes sense.