Before jumping in, I’d love to clarify a few things:

• when we say, “FB product”, I’m assuming it will be embedded within the Facebook blue app vs being a separate standalone app or within the family of apps (IG, WhatsApp); though that may be a path to pursue down the road
• Geographically, while we would eventually want something built for global scale, I’m assuming that we’ll start with the US market, since it’s more homogeneous, there are similar standards in the healthcare system, etc and we can get good signal on if our solution is landing.
• Are there any particular timelines we should consider [6 months]
• Do those assumptions sound fair?

Great – so, we’re designing a product within the FB app for organ donation in the US. This aligns with Facebook’s mission of giving the power to build community and bringing the world closer together. I also know anecdotally that some of this behavior is happening organically on Facebook, which is a leading indicator that people are looking to do this on the platform, and it can be accelerated through a product. Facebook also has the scale of people on the platform to make a meaningful impact in this area.

 

Our mission for this solution is to bring the world closer together by making it easier for those in need to connect with donors that can help, bringing hope, health and connection to everyone.

I’ll walk through my approach:

• I’ll start with total market and prioritize who we want to build for
• Then, I’ll dive into the pain points / needs for our user segment
• We’ll prioritize which needs to focus on and start mapping out solutions that can address them
• I’ll then prioritize the best solutions and recommend what our MVP would look like

Let me know how that sounds, or if you have any feedback?

TOTAL MARKET

Organ donation is a double-sided marketplace

• In need of organ (Demand)
  • Patient – I’m searching for an organ for me
  • Caregiver – I’m searching for an organ for my loved one
  • Medical professional – I’m searching for organ(s) for my patient(s)
• Donor of organ (Supply)
  • Willing to donate while alive (liver, kidney, bone marrow)
  • Willing to donate after die (all organs)
• Note, you could also segment by organ and try to assess where there are supply gaps, but assumption is that the same people are willing to donate multiple organs (e.g. if I am willing to donate my liver, I’m also willing to donate my kidney)
• Also want to acknowledge that there are also government organizations and non-profits that we may want to partner with in this solution who are aligned to this mission and centralize the sign-up flow

I’d recommend prioritizing the supply side of the marketplace. My rationale is because people in need of organs are more desperate and will easily sign up for any product / solution that will bring them closer to getting what they need, but the solution will not be valuable for them until we build up supply.

To prioritize where to focus on the supply side, I would look at market size, alignment with mission, and complexity. While I’d do some research to validate this, I would pursue the “willing to donate after die” bucket of people because I’m assuming that’s a significantly larger audience, and it would be difficult to get people to agree to donate their organs while they’re alive for people outside of their close friends & family circle. There’s also a higher degree of “matching” that would need to take place for those who donate while alive, which would be better served through other means vs on the FB platform.

Now, let’s go deeper to understand this audience’s journey & challenges along the way:

People willing to donate organs after they die:

• Organ donation is not top of mind
• Don’t know how to sign up to help
• Don’t know how the process works after they die
•  

To determine which part of the journey to focus on, I would prioritize with the following criteria:

 

 

Based on the above, I would build a solution that can achieve two things:

1. Raise awareness that there’s a need for organ donors
2. Drive sign-ups for organ donation

 

Let’s brainstorm what some features are that can achieve this

• Raise awareness that there’s a need for organ donors
  • Notifications:
    • Notification upon logging into FB that shows number of people waiting for organ donors in the country
  • Feed / Stories:
    • First story in tray showing profiles of people in local community awaiting organs (content from non-profits, government agency)
    • First news feed insertion showing content from non-profits, government agency that we partnered with
  • Ranking & Tab visibility:
    • Rank news stories about organ donation / needs higher on the search tab
    • Rank organ donor groups higher to surface within the groups tab
    • Rank organ donation pages higher to surface within the pages tabs
• Drive sign-ups for organ donation
  • Donate organ checkbox & flow in FB profile creation
  • Add a profile badge for anyone who completes a sign up
  • Add organ donor sign-up flow after awareness messages (e.g. feed / story or notification highlighted above)
  • Auto-publish a Story or Feed insertion whenever someone in your network signs up to be a donor
  • Provide a notification whenever someone in your network signs up to be a donor, driving to link on how to sign up
  • Create a donor drive feed unit, where people can select from friends and family to get them to sign up. You can see who in the community is driving the most sign-ups and get recognized through a virtual badge

Based on ability to drive sign-ups and speed to market, recommend building a combination of features into a holistic end to end solution, with the MVP being the following:

• Form partnership with government agency that records donor data
• Entrypoint:
  • Drive awareness of need for donors through ranking content from partner government agency in feed / stories; build a [Sign-up to donate] call to action in their posts / stories
• Sign-up Flow:
  • Open in-unit form upon clicking on the CTA that captures minimal data required
  • Pre-check option to share donor status publicly upon submission, which will drive notifications and enable profile badge
• Notifications:
  • Create “[name] received an organ donor badge” notification, which would also drive to the sign-up flow

All these features bundled together would create a virtuous cycle helping drive awareness of organ donation, while also delivering more sign-ups. Eventually can explore the competition / recognition idea.

 

To summarize:

We wanted to design a FB product for organ donation – our mission was to bring the world closer together by making it easier for those in need to connect with donors that can help, bringing hope, health and connection to everyone.

 

This is a double-sided marketplace, with people in need of organs on one side, and donors on the other side. We prioritized focusing on donors, since there won’t be enough value till we build the supply side.

 

We chose to focus on donors who will donate after they pass because that was the largest market, with the lowest barrier.

 

We focused on a solution to address two parts of the journey that go hand-in-hand:

1. Awareness that there’s a need for donors
2. The sign-up process

Our initial feature set in the MVP, includes:

 

• Entrypoints in feed & stories by including a sign-up to be a donor call-to-action from posts that we would rank highly through our partnership with the appropriate government agency
• In-feed / Stories sign-up flow with minimal data required to secure the donor
• Sharing via notifications and in-feed/Stories and profile badge
• We would measure the adoption of the MVP by looking at # of sign-ups completed