Product Manager Portfolio
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You’re the PM for WhatsApp and you have $1B to invest. What would you do?

  • Related to Product Strategy
  • For Generalist PM
  Microsoft
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Answers (1)
Strengths :
  • WhatsApp has become the default messaging tool for majority of internet users in developing countries specially in Asia, and Africa
    • Network effects. Almost all of the people in the family and office are already present
  • Video calls and audio calls have also picked up
  • Has recently begun the whatsapp for business
Weaknesses:
  • Has not innovated much since the launch.
    • Telegram taking over the group chats or community
    • Has to catered to most use cases which are in demand
      • No way to schedule the events (people want to call each other at a particular time)
      • messaging in group sucks ( no way to thread or fork )
      • Navigation and organisation of chat is really bad
        • No filtering
  • Has stuck to primarily focused on B2C, where it is finding hard to make money
Competition :
  • Telegram has taken over the group discussions
  • Google Meet and Zoom have taken over the group calling
  • Slack and teams have taken over the professional groups
  • Google Pay has disrupted markets like India.
Opportunity :
Given the Covid situation,
  • Work from home will continue to see more adoption, everyone will prefer virtual hang outs than in person meetings.
    • Video/Calls for official and personal reasons has seen the spike. it would continue to increase
    • Slack and teams have seen excessive hike in the adoption
  • Digital payments will see a spike in adoption
    • P2P contact less payments will continue to see the spike
    • Transactions with merchants will see adoption of digital mediums
  • E-commerce is picking up, and engagement will increase in this space
    • Users want to be in constant touch with the seller for any queries
    • May want to directly buy things from whatsApp
Recommendations :
Two pronged strategy to invest 1 Billion USD more wisely
  • Retain the lead in the existing P2P communication in the developing countries
    • Invest 10% of 1 Billion of USD in improving the product to avoid churn
      • Proposals mentioned above are :
        • Improving the filtering, discoverability etc
        • Improving group discussions
        • Events in whatsapp
  • Invest in new categories aggressively to catch up with leads and take over the market. In remaining 90% of the money left, 30% of the money can be spent on the following domains.
    • Invest in Video/audio calls along with facilities for event and calendar creations
      • will directly hit google meet and zoom
      • Check if any new start ups like Loom or airmeet can be acquired.
    • Aggressively purse in Whatsapp payments
      • Adopt UPI in india more aggressively for P2P payments
        • Spend marketing money to get more customers
        • Build features in the product to ensure all the basis use cases are taken care of
          • Ledger to know my expenses
          • Track the payments to my peers
    • Invest in enabling businesses through WhatsApps : Give this feature free of cost to businesses to attract,
      • Customer support can be enabled to begin with
      • Businesses can take order in the next phase