Ask some questions before answering this type of product design question.

Question Why are we building this product? Is there a reason why Google is interested in building this now?

Interviewer: No specific reason we were just exploring the opportunity to see if it makes sense.

Okay, well Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, so I think it makes sense to organize all of the information around courses. Similarly, Google’s core competency is in search, so I think it makes sense to create a product around search, and to drive engagement within Google search ecosystem in general. The first goal of this product will be to drive engagement with it. Then, later on we can look at monetizing it.

Now I’ll think about different user groups.  Fundamentally, when learning it’s about the learners and the teachers. Or the course consumers and the course creators. So any product I create is going to need to take both of these user groups into account.

I’m now going to take a moment to think about the user needs for each of these user types and their user journies.

Learners

Course creators

Now I’m going to identify some pain points to see if there are any gaps that we can address.

Use case	Pain point	Impact
Find a course	Too many courses to pick from Finding a course that is a good fit (too hard or too easy)	High
Take a course	Difficulty accessing the course content (e.g. offline, or when not in person, or on mobile) Not enough personalized instruction	Medium
Get assessed on the course	* Takes a long time to get assessed * Assessment is too cookie cutter doesn’t take into account subtletees if automated.	Low
Share accreditation	People don’t trust or respect the accreditation	Low

So of these, finding a good course is highest impact for learners, and distributing the course is high impact for course creators. So I’m going to focus on creating a market place type product where we can help learners find high quality relevant courses and help course creators find appropriate consumers of their content.

So now I’m going to brainstorm some solutions for these two pain points

Okay, so I’ve got a lot of different ideas here.  For the MVP: I would include aggregating/indexing all of the various courses from across the different platforms and allow filtering by different topics (Learner feature 1 & 2). These are the must-have features. We actually don’t need any of the seller features, because google can automatically scrape/index the vast majority of the course listings without active participation by course creators.

Then post-launch, I’d prioritize Learner feature 3 (posting reviews), Seller feature 2 (allowing sellers to optimize and edit their content description to make it more accurate if needed), seller feature 3(show sellers search terms and click-through rate for various courses) and seller feature 5 (bidding on search terms) to monetize the product.

Now I’m going to look at how I would measure success. Fundamentally, this product is about matching supply and demand (course creators with learners), so my primary metric needs to be something that measures that. I want to look at the number of courses that are clicked through on and growth rate if this over time. Ideally, I’d look at course completion, but I can’t do that because course completion will occur outside of the google ecosystem on the course creator’s platform.

For my secondary metrics, I want to look at

So to summarize, I am creating a Google product to help people learn new skills  I focused on the use case of helping learners identify appropriate courses from across the web, and helping course creators reach appropriate learners.  My MVP would focus on creating a course search function with a series of filters, and I would measure success by looking at the number of courses clicked on and growth rate over time.