Product Manager Portfolio
Back to questions

How would you improve Google Home?

  • Related to Product Improvement
  • For Generalist PM
  Google
Add Your Answer
Answers (3)

Google’s mission: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.

Google Home: It’s a digital voice assistant that wakes up to “Hey Google” and “Okay, Google”. It comes in 3 versions at different price points and features: Google Home, Google Home Mini, and Google Nest. The smart speaker is common to all versions.

Clarifying questions –

  • What’s wrong with the current experience?  and What is the goal of improvement – acquisition, activation, engagement, or retention? Since Google and Alexa have similar market shares (around 30%), the assumption is to consider engagement as the goal.
  • Are we looking at improving the hardware/software aspects of the product? – I will consider both for now and prioritize later based on impact and effort
  • Is this for a special user segment? – up to you
User groups using Google Home:
  • Kids: Kids use it for all kinds of questions like playing rhymes, read them a bedtime story, read a book for them
  • Young Adults: Use it for setting alarms, read the weather,  know about movies, actors and control their devices using Google Home voice commands
  • Visually impaired: access the product for an audio experience
I would like to focus on the kids as the impact of increasing engagement will be highest for kids. And that will in turn attract more parents to the platform.
Pain Points in detail:
  • Kids want entertaining responses
  • Should be simple to understand and follow
  • The content should be monitored/filtered so that it is suitable
  • Kids are glued to TV and mobiles and parents want to reduce the screen time
Features:
  • Gamification of responses by recognizing the voice of a kid. For e.g. stars or leaderboard on completion of some activities and tell the user where on the leaderboard he/she is compared to kids in the same age group
  • Monitoring of the content being viewed. There should be controls for the parent to exclude adult content
  • Google Home should have some learning activities for kids of different age groups and act as an  alternative to learning apps on mobile
Solution Impact Effort
Gamification of responses High High. Identify the voice of a kid and categorize in age groups and analyze the content for creating a leaderboard
Monitoring Content Low as kids might be frustrated if some content they want to hear might become restricted High. Add additional features for parents while setting up the account, allow for edits to the content
Learning Activities High. as already kids are used to learning activities on the apps due to virtual education setup during the pandemic Medium. Need to introduce different activities for different age groups

 

Based upon the above matrix, I would prioritize Learning activities.

Metrics to be monitored:

#no of kids using a learning activity

length of the session of the learning activity

no of logins per user/daily/weekly/monthly

I would first start by asking the following questions:

  • The physical aspects of the software aspects of Google Home? –> Any part.
  • Is this for a specific user segment? –> Let´s assume that is up to me.
  • What would be our improvement goal? –> Let´s say the engagement with the product.
As a recap, Google Home (GH) is a smart home assistant with a voice user interface and a digital assistant called Google Assistant.
How do we measure engagement?
  • Avg # of queries /day
  • Avg # of different users /day (telling them apart by their voice)
User groups who are using Google Home:
  • Visually impaired or otherwise handicapped people, where Google Home offers an accessible experience through the voice user interface
  • Families who have it in their household, to play music, and have a digital assistant in their kitchen or living room, for example
  • Technology enthusiasts who want to automate their household and want to have a smart home assistant to manage their automated homes
Among those, I think Families is the broadest user group where we should focus on improving engagement.
What are the biggest pain points for families when it comes to smart speakers?
  1. Onboarding and set up: Most members do not know what the GH is capable of and how to configure it
  2. Accuracy of Voice Interface: The accuracy of the voice user interface is not good enough to ask for complex things
  3. Output Volume: Audio levels are either too low or too high.
Priority Problem Solution Impact (1-5) Costs (1-5)
P2 1) Onboarding and Set up Personalized onboarding experience that asks users for their goals and their use cases with GH. Through this, we would already setup a more engaging user experience right from the bat. 3 2
P0 1) Onboarding and Set up To active every family member, we could ask everyone in the family connected to the wifi to complete their own onboarding with GH. Thereby, we let everyone in a family participate and engage with the device. Which makes for a much more personal experience and triggers the IKEA effect (you always like the stuff you do your self better) 5 2
P3 2) Accuracy of Voice Interface To improve the voice interface’s accuracy, I could imagine that users start an interactive dialog mode with GH. Whenever a query failed the first time, Google could offer to go into interactive dialog mode, where the GH would ask a series of questions that would then result in a better outcome. Such as, “what should I do,” “where should I search for this,” “when do you want this do be executed.” 2 1
P1 3) Output Volume The GH could adjust its speaker’s volume to the noise environment that it currently records. Users would still adjust the volume when playing music, but the default would be that the GH would answer with the same volume as it received the request. 2 1

 

Taken together, I would improve the onboarding experience of Google Home so that everyone in the family could setup their own goals and preferences and have a personal onboarding experience. Thereby, every member gets to know the assistant’s functionalities and capabilities better and engages more with the device from the get-go.

Clarify

  1. First I want to clarify my understanding of the product. Google home is a device which can play music, set timers, tell the weather, tell jokes, and overall enable users to interact with information using voice commands. Is that correct?
  2. When we are thinking about improving Google home are there any particular objectives that we are prioritizing? [up to me]
  3. As Google home is as physical product, should I consider changes to the physical attributes or focus on the software? [focus on the software]
Goals
  1. Google is likely tryng to focus on increasing market share for it’s home and NEST products in order to lock out Amazon from owning the market of smart home devices. For the sake of this excercise, I’d like to focus on market share as the key metric to focus on, as I assume there is a large population that of customers that have not yet purchased a Google home or Amazon Alexa device.
User groups
  1. Non-smart home owners – people who do not own a smart assistant for the home – may be concered with privacy
  2. Smart home novices – people who may own one other types of smart home devices such as a thermostat or doorbell but who odn’t own a smart assistant
  3. Smart home gurus – people whose home is equipped with a range of smart home devices, including a Google home
I’d like to focus on the smart home novices, as they may be less concerned about privacy issues and may just be unaware of the wide range of features on a Google home device
Pain points
Common pain points for smart home novices:
  • Trying to keep kid who is doing remote learning to stick to a schedule – High
  • Trying to achieve health goals – High
  • Trying to maximize time with family while minimizing screen time – Low
  • Trying to try new recipes in the kitchen  – Med
I’d like to focus on pain points related achieving health goals because those could be high value to users who are staying
Solutions
1. Daily health digest – curate news on health topics of interest and share them on command (e.g. new research on managing diabetes)
2. Inspire and remind users about their health goals – users could input a goal initially and google home could curate content to support that goal or inspire the user to take action for that goal – don’t forget you are going to skip desert tonight
3.Virtual coach – Your fitbit is showing that steps are lower than normal. Take a lap around the living room after your 10am call
Rate solutions
1. Health digest
  • Imact: Low
  • Effort: Low
  • Rating: Nice to have
2. Inspire and remind re: health goals
  • Impact: Medium
  • Effort: Medium
  • Rating: Should have
3. Virtual coach
  • Impact: High
  • Effort: Medium
  • Rating: Must have
Recommendation:
Virtual coach
  • We will develop a new skill that will lead users through a voice driving onboarindg
  • During onboarding, users will indicate what their goal is – loose weight (how much), drop a pants size, gain muscle, etc., what their starting point is (e.g. current weight), age, food and exercise preferences etc.
  • Each day, home will ask the user to do activities to make progress towards their goal – e.g. – “good morning Nicole. today i recommend you start by doing a 7 minute exercise routine which I can talk you through”.
  • Weekly challenges could help users make additonal progress – e.g. “Re-arrange your fridge so that health snacks are in plain sight”
  • This feature would require training an algorthim to devise customized plans for users based on content curated from the web

Success metrics:

Primary: Market share of google home sales/quarter

Secondary: Engagement and retention with coaching feature

Summarize:

– We are trying to drive market share for google home by focusing on the smart home novice user

– We identified 4 common pain points and rated them

– We identified three potential solutions and rated them and decided to focus on a virtual coach