You are a new PM at Facebook. Design an app to help people save money.

• Young people main focal areas will be financial saving – awareness, education, exposure to tools and process
• Have less money: They either get a allowance or earn less
• Want to learn about smart saving tools and process
• Connect with friends / communities that have same goals and objective
• Want to set personal goals and meet those targets
• want to share their learning
• want to build a strong creditscore
• want to cover and pay their outstanding loans such as student loans, creit card loans etc
• want to buget and undertsnf their spendings

• have big saving goals – want to save money for house, car, wedding, future education
• optimize their budget and learn better tools and process
• want to learn and get better at investments – market
• want to know how their friends are doign
• want to effectivey plan for retirement

• want to know how to best plan for speding their savings
• want to collbarate in saving w/ their children

Let’s assume we are building a Facebook app and the purpose of the app is to help its users save money.

When I think about the persona’s interested in this service, I can think of a few user groups:

– Teens (pre-college) – They are not responsible for making money. They have very limited budget and sometimes get pocket money.

– College Students – They have limited budget but they do receive grants, loans, financial help from parents they sometimes earn small payments to pay for their living expenses

– University graduates – They work and make money. They spend time into financial planning and career planning. They have more complex financial lives.

For this case, I’m going to focus on the “students” group. I think it’s an interesting group to explore. They are tech and active on the social media. They have fairly simple financial life, making it easier for us to launch a new product.

When I think about the needs of the students, I can think of a few use cases:
– They receive grants and loans from university
– They usually pay rent
– They eat lots of fast food / cheap food
– They go out with their friends a lot and can spend a lot of money on socializing
– They sometimes don’t have any experience in making money
– They share expenses with their roommates
– They work in the summer to save some money to be able to pay for their school year expenses

Now, I’d like to brainstorm a few ideas to solve for some of the use cases listed above:

Idea 1 – A tool that uses student’s social media activities to score their likelihood of returning loans. Pass this information to the banks and obtain low interest fee loans for them
Idea 2 – Enable Facebook friends to create a group and compete with each other on reaching saving targets
Idea 3 – Gamify saving by enabling users to earn badges for reaching certain financial targets
Idea 4 – Connect with their bank account, analyze their historical expenses, estimate money needed for the future (rent, food, etc), and send warnings over Facebook Messenger if they go over budget
Idea 5 – Spending breakdown – Show breakdown of your expenses and show where you’re spending more than your Facebook friends

Now, I would like to evaluate each of these ideas based on impact on customer experience and cost of implementation.
Idea 1 – High on consumer impact, very expensive as you need to work with the banks
Idea 2 – Medium value to consumer (it can be fun and engaging), medium cost (develop capability to create groups, connect to banks to download statements, and create UI for the users)
Idea 3 – Low value to customer (badges are valuable if they can be shared. People are private about their financial status), low cost of implementation
Idea 4 – Low impact on customer (their banks can offer this. There is nothing unique about the service), low cost of implementation
Idea 5 – High value on consumer (it helps them see how they are doing compared to their friends), Medium cost

Out of the ideas above, I would focus on building a product that uses features 2 and 5. My MVP will include idea 5 and my V2 will have idea 2. To build the MVP, I would enable the user to connect to connect their Facebook Money Save app to be able to download statements and analyze transactions, categorize them, and compare users’ financial behaviors. The product will enable a Facebook user to invite their friends to the app and start comparing their financial lives with each other. For example, it will say 30% of your spending was on food last month whereas only 20% of your friend’s spending was on food. This product can be expanded to many additional features over time. Here are a list of few:
– Invite users to congratulate each other for reaching certain financial targets
– Enable users to give feedback to each other like “here is how I reduced my spending on food”
– Allow users to challenge each other (e.g. reduce next month’s entertainment spending by 20%)

First, I would ask FB’s goal – Say Increased engagement.

First I would ask the interviewer what saving money is. For this I would explain the following:
Saving money can be achieved by increasing income/interest etc or reducing cost/

So increasing income aspect – I would say the following options are possible – Banking/Financial Services/Credit services/Help find a better job for you

Saving money through reduced cost will include the following options – Apartment finder, Grocery services, Marketplace, travel services, local services – e.g. plumbing, contractor, handyman, carpenter, etc., Realtor, Insurance, Education, Healthcare.
Essentially I analyze all the possible aspects the customer can save money via reduced cost.

So I would understand this first.
Assume the interviewer asks me to choose one branch.
I would choose the reduction in cost. Reasoning being, it is not a completely new vertical like financial services, which would mean significant partnership with banks and financial institutions.

Here the typical customer profile would be – age 20 – 45, who wishes to use FB as her one-stop place for accessing services that are needed in daily life.
Further I would then prioritize among the various services that I have listed using 3 dimensions – Benefit, Cost and Risk. Essentially Benefits would include Business, Strategy as well as customer benefit, Cost – operational and developmental cost and Risk could include – business, legal, time of development risks etc

I will then prioritize this and then if the interviewer further asks me to show the way I would design each of these apps, I would then use the CIRCLES framework to design each of these apps.

Since Facebook wants to help people save money, we want to leverage its core competencies in its network with friends and existing data it already has:
– Using social capital to behaviorally nudge users.
– Recently saw this with their donations. It encourages people to share that they donated and its optional the amount.

Users who are most likely to use apps to save money:
– Millenials
– young couples

Lets focus on the millennials and define the problems they face currently:

1- As a millennial, I find it hard to motivate myself to hit financial goals
2- As a millennial, I find it difficult to know how well Im saving or spending in comparison to my peers
3- As a millennial, I don’t know what categories am i spending too much on? What should too much be for me?

With Facebook being the social platform for most millennials, this can be a way for users to share expense data anonymously and also get data driven value from it. Let’s focus on the 2nd and 3rd problems here.

The user will provide basic demographic information (Facebook already knows most peoples’ birthdates, current city and marital status). So, this may not even be required for most users. Users will then have to link their credit card/checking account info.

As most existing financial services offer right now, we’ll provide an analysis of the expenses in a pie chart broken down into categories. But additional benefit comes with another pie chart that showcases the average spending breakdown for that same demographic of people.

Based on that, Facebook can offer actions that the user can take to hit their financial goals.

We can use the same donation model that Facebook has already rolled out for users to advertise when they’ve reached or accomplished their financial goals they set up.