Clarifying questions

1.   Clarify google docs – it is an online word processing software that google offers that completes with Microsoft word?  Yes

2.   Google offers docs both to general users and as part of G Suite.  Do you want to me to focus on a particular segment?  you decide.

3.   When you say to improve is there an area of improvement that you are looking for?  – you decide

4. Any Constraints – You decode.

5. What is the goal – you tell

6. Why is google looking to improve – you tell

7. Any specific geographic location – US

Describe the product

Google docs is an online word processing software that allows a user to do a full suite of word processing tasks all through the browser.  The product is offered as part of the G suite as well as free account through gmail account.

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds information and make it easily accessible and useful.  Organizing the written word fits into the Google’s mission.

Goal of improvement ? Google has over 2 Bn users. I believe the goal should be more acquisition or engagement. Most users know about Google docs and have used it at some point. So the goal should be engagement – keep users engaged with Google docs

User personas:

1. Enterprise users – MS is dominant

2. Small business owners

3. Students

4. Personal use

I want to focus on small business owners as 1. they need a word processor to run business. 2. There are over 30M small businesses in US. (99% of businesses are small business). This is a big market and it is important to meet their needs.

Pain points/Needs:

1. Cannot decide which word processor to use Google docs or MS word

2. What is best template to make a flyer for my business

3. Best Template for contracts with my suppliers

4. Easily share documents with my team to comment on

5. Collaborate on documents with my team so they can edit too

6. Easily share my document while on meeting with clients, team members etc.

I believe painpoint 4 & 5 is well taken care of by Google docs. Google docs have strong collaboration feature. Painpoint #2 and #3 are unmet needs and relate to templates. So I will focus on this. This will also help meet our goals – keep users engaged with Google docs.

Solutions:

1. Marketplace for different templates

   1. There should be a marketplace where Google offers different templates based on industry, user functions etc.  (H, M)

2. Purchase service: Users can look up for template service. Google should have registered specialist who can offer different service to users – such as providing sales template, or creating a flyer or contracts etc    (M, L)

3. Smart assistant:

   1. This assistant ask user for their needs, based on that auto create a template for user. For instance user could say template with yellow background, geared for sales, for technology industry. Based on that create a template. This would be smart, so if user makes any changes it learns from it and provides more accurate templates as the more user uses it.

Prioritizing my solutions by Impact vs Effort

#1 – H, M

#2 – M, L

#3 – M, M

Based on my prioritization I suggest creating a marketplace where google offers different templates. It meets our goal of increasing user engagement. It provides a very high impact to users and the effort for Google should be a medium effort.

Metrics:

1. #of users using marketplace templates

2. Active user – daily, weekly, monthly

3. # of templates used by users

My north star metric should be active users (daily, weekly, monthly)  as the goal is to increase engagement. The #of active users metric should be rising.

Trade-offs: 1. There may not be enough template to meet all user needs

How would you improve Google Docs.

Clarifying questions

1. When you say google docs I just want t make sure that we are talking about the online word processing software that google offers that completes with Microsoft word?  Yes
2. Google offers docs both to general users and as part of G Suite.  Do you want to me to focus on a particular segment?  You are the PM you decide.
3. When you say improve is there an area of improvement that you are looking for?  You are the PM you decide.

Describe the product

Google docs is an online word processing software that allows a user to do a full suite of word processing tasks all through the browser.  The product is offered as part f the google apps that accompany a google email account and is part of the g-suite of paid business tools.

The product generally fits into the Google’s mission of organizing the worlds information and make is accessible and useful.  Organizing the written word fits into the mission.  Google is also looking for the next billion users and Google Docs is part of Google classroom which is showing students the ease of using cloud-based SaaS software instead of local software.  Google Docs is also part of the  G-Suite set of products to help business.

Constraints

Do I have any constraints or can I make reasonable decisions as the PM?  You are the PM.

 

Personas

There are a number of persona groupings that we could look at such as

Business users

Students

Personal use

Or

Single writers

Collaborators

Is there a persona group you would like me to focus on?  Otherwise I am going to pick collaborators.  The reason for this is choice is that Docs is a pretty full fledge product and going down the path of Business users, students, personal use will take us into trying to define pain points against a mature product.  However in the time of covid where everyone is working online collaborators is a huge user base and growing – getting features right for collaborators will transect user groups such as business, students and personal.  Finally in the time of covid the better your collaboration use cases are the better you can position the product against competition.  – OK use collaborators

Background

At my last job I think it was pretty common for folks to write in MS word but when we needed to collaborate we would upload the file to Docs.

Pain points

Users need to collaborate – but also need to talk while working

Users need to collaborate – but don’t always work on the section you want them to

Users collaborate – you want to see the changes made by others

Brainstorm

At this point I could prioritize the pain points but because we have a pretty tight set, I would like to come up a solution or two for each. And then see which one makes sense.

Pain point	idea	Impact	Difficulty	Metric
Users need to talk	Maintain a chat thread like slack with each document	Low to medium – users are likely already using a general purpose chat agent and if this only applied to docs or even only applied to google products many users would rather use a general purpose threaded chat.	Low to medium – google already has chat functions in some apps and google already stores comments in docs -so this is more like running comments in a thread form.	Acquisition – number of users that use the feature. Acquisition period over period users – shows growth or decline. Engagement – number of chat posts per collaboratively edited doc
Users need to talk	Integrate google meet into docs – allows users to initiate meet from with docs with the ability to invite other concurrent editors to join or invite others that have access to the doc	Medium to high – in the world of video chat Meets is less popular than zoom and likely teams.  Tight integration might boost usage and would be very convenient	Low to medium – Might be as simple as launching meets from inside Docs.  May require custom video layout and invite screens	Acquisition – number of users that use the feature. Acquisition period over period users – shows growth or decline. Engagement – number of meet sessions per  collaboratively edited doc
Work on the section	Allow the doc owner to highlight  section and create a focus area.  Today you can share edit privileges to a doc essentially this is like sharing edit privileges to a section or chapter.  This could be permanent or temporal during the edit session		High – Very High – I think there is a fundamental shift in the current user rights and storage of docs.  Today the users rights are at file level.  This would move it down to the text block section, chapter etc.  This is likely a big change
you want to see the changes	Docs currently stores version history.  Docs also has redline like features where edits are suggestions.  But what if you could toggle on the changes made by a other users or even better only be a certain use.	Low – docs is already storing revision history and redline functionality – this is an expansion on that.	Likely low – because Docs is already storing revision history and redline functionality this might simply be a feature where we expose data that is already stored.

Pick and summarize

We looked at a number of features that would help collaboration.  Collaboration is the wining feature of Covid and is a high priority. When I was at my last job we would constantly use docs and jump on skype to talk and video while editing.  This behavior was organic and is likely happening with many other users.  Creating a tight integration between docs and meets would solve this real life use case and introduce a broader audience to Meets.  The solution has medium to high impact as it impacts behavior that is currently taking place.  The effort can range from

low – launch Meets from a button in docs

medium – custom screens that handle the video chat view and invite view

The nice thing about connecting docs and meets is that the features could lead to introduction of users to meets and solve not only a collaboration issue on docs  but user acquisition on meets.

Primary metrics would include

1. acquisition – # of users that use meets from docs
2. acquisition – # of users that use meets from docs period over period (shows growth)
3. Engagement – %  of meet sessions started  per collaboratively edited doc