Q. How would you improve YouTube?
Clarify – Is there a specific aspect of the product that needs to be improved. What is the target audience for this improvement exercise? Is there any specific metric we are looking to improve?

Assuming we are speaking about the whole product here and a global audience let’s dive in.

Personas:
YouTube has a plethora of content being uploaded each minute. We will try to start with a broad set of two categories and narrow it down.
1. Content Creator
2. Content Consumer
Both the personas can be narrowed down into categories
1. Entertainment – Music, movies, web series, stand-ups etc
2. News
3. Travel Vlogs
4. Education – coding, excel, MBA or other entrance preparation
5. DIY Videos

Problems:
Note: I am not including problems like too many ads, lower resolution download option etc as this is a part of the business model that YouTube has
The major problems revolve around interactivity, especially in Travel, Education, DIY and News categories

1. As a software developer while watching a coding tutorial, I need to pause, read the code and then write it on my personal computer to test it. It is tedious.

For any educational video, the material sharing like links, articles, images or other notes can only be done via ‘Description’ which is very limited.

As a creator of such videos, I can just share a brief ‘static’ description but something like a code or other notes keep changing while I speak.

2.  If I am watching a Travel Video and the creator speaks about a place, I want immediately look for Hotels in that area, travel modes and costs, distance from a particular place etc.

Currently, I note down the place, minimise the app, visit Google and gather this info
As a creator, I have an entire itinerary ready and wish to share it with the viewers. The only possible way is to show it as an image in the video which is the least interactive way. At max, you may provide a few links in the description, but that again is limited and takes the user away from the main content
3. A similar problem exists for DIY videos as well for both, Creators and Viewers

Solution – Timeline-Tagging
As a creator, If I am able to tag the timeline at multiple places with multimedia (texts, images, links, location)
1. The education creators will be able to add notes, code snippets, installation links, commands etc at multiple places. For example, I will add the installation link at the 31st second when I am talking about installation, add a code snippet at 1:05 and so on.
2. Similarly, the travel vlog creators can add locations, hotel details and other itinerary items in a tagged timeline, something like a geo-tagged timeline. The viewers will then not have to note the place and jump to another app for more details.

This will make the whole experience interactive and viewer-friendly. The snippets, notes and itinerary will appear at the real estate below the portrait player.

Initial Scope:
Build a simple tagged timeline wherein a creator can add any multimedia at multiple points on the video timeline

Success Metrics:
Creator:
1. Percentage of Creators using the Timeline Tagging Feature
2. The Avg number of tags per timeline (for tagged timeline)

Viewer:
1. Total number of viewers accessing the tagged timeline per day
2. Percentage of viewers accessing the tagged timeline

As an indirect indicator, we will also be tracking the percentage increase in the average watch time per user (post this feature is released)

PS: Intentionally not attempting to use framework as a crutch and trying to hide it away but still trying to present structured conversation.

Ok let me try to unpack what to focus on. YouTube has other products that are rarely used, at least by most of my age, such as YouTube kids, Academy, etc. It also has Movies/Shows, Gaming, etc. Is there any specific product of YT you would like to focus on?

Also, since we want to improve on it, are there any specific focus areas we know of from maybe feedback log? Any specific interest from leadership in what to improve?

YT is mostly used on mobile for entertainment videos but when it comes to learning YT gets used more on desktop; laptop. Is that a fair assumption? Ok, so I would like to first think of who uses YT and what their needs might be before I decide if I am focused on desktop/laptop. I am not sure if my solution would differ based on that just yet.

1 last thing: Before we focus on specific north star, I would like to think about what my focus area of improvement might be.

As I think of users that use YT 1)Students 2)Professionals 3)Elderly who might be even retired. I could break these segments further but I think it’s beneficial to not be too narrowly focused. For this case, let’s focus on Professionals just because I think for entertainment we have captured the market quite well but when you think of learning, there are competing products such as Coursera, Udemy, etc. Also, students tend to have ample time to read books, ask professor, etc. and they tend to read chapters entirely while professionals need quick info. I think YT serves that market well and Coursera’s of the world don’t quite give you that. So while we are serving a niche segment we still have significant resource pool and we can make a big impact. If you are ok, I would like to think how I can improve the product for them. But before I get there since we are focusing on improving ‘Learning’ aspects of YT, it may make more sense to build it mainly for desktop / laptop. I still don’t know if it will matter but we will see. Considering, learning is our focus, I think it may make sense to think of increasing Engagement / Retention.

Pain-points: I think as a professional, there are few aspects that I wish could be served 1)unknown unknowns – I don’t know what I don’t know 2)competition with co-workers and wanting to be ahead in knowledge – the what if my co-worker knows more than I do fear. 3)I can’t remember what I have searched and what I haven’t already searched – I enter so many keywords; I am not going to remember everything I have searched for. Even if I do, I problem won’t search for it again since last time i didnt get anything with those keywords. But I may be missing out new content that I could have found with the same keywords again.

I think these are huge problems to be solved, so let’s focus on 1 and 2 because I think #3 isn’t that much of a concern considering YT is extremely good with pulling up relevant content without a need for keyword preciseness. + most professionals YT exp could be enhanced by 1 an d 2 vs. #3 won’t make a huge impact. This will help us Retain them to our platform for learning purposes.

Let’s see how improvement could be made in identified areas for #1. As stated, while YT is good at bringing me content based on my keywords, sometimes I don’t know what else i should be learning. AI brings up relevant and related material but does miss out on other things (if I am YT a lot on API Management platform product learning it may not bring up UX videos but reality is learning about UX will help be build a better platform). I think we can improve that by:

a)Create a group feature whereby people can belong to created groups and you can see results of what people in that group are also learning / watching. So imagine there is a group for #APIM Product Management, and there are 1M members, I see results of what those group members are watching. If I enter keywords, I would get results only  based on what that group has watched.

b)Follow a creator whom I like and see what he/she is learning and watching. Creators got to that that level to be able to create content only by learning a lot so I assume they are learning similar things constantly that I should learn as well.

2a) It be great to integrate w/ Linkedin and then I can choose whose learnings I want to follow. This could be co-worker that I can tap into his/her learnings. This might be an opt-in / out feature whereby I would have to allow my co-worker to follow and track what I learn to help each other out. Not many co-workers would want to allow that but leadership who is above you will. Additionally, in a big consulting firm like Accenture, people happily share learnings using internal KX sites. So I definitely see consultants sharing what they are learning.

I think 3 solutions are decently instrumental to address ensuring learners use YT more for learning and keep them interested in using YT for it. However, I do think 2a is probably most impactful without much of a trade-off. 1a has a huge trade-off in the sense that there could be 1M members in a single group and each of those might be watching so many unique things so ultimately it will be so much information that it’s going to not allow audience to be focused which is what we were trying to solve to begin with. 1b i dont think adds as much value because the creator may just be creating material from what they already know and not necessary that he/she is learning some new things. + How do you know you are learning the best of best and also there gets into issues of user privacy.

I do think that from an evaluation standpoint, 2a has low complexity (C=2 from scale of 1-5) and high on user value (5). The trade-off again is information sharing and feeling like you loose competitive edge if you let your co-workers know what you are learning so I am not sure how many will be open to sharing all the content they are learning. It will surely also get people to keep coming back on YT to learn since they are get to learn very relevant stuff without having to search much.

I would like to evaluate post launch, maybe after a QTR, how we are doing. I think best would be to track % of profiles using learn recommendations from LinkedIn connections > 1 time. Also, tracking % of integrations with LinkedIn might be valuable but I doubt this really gets us to evaluate if people find the feature helpful.

Overall, I think it’s best to improve YT for professionals since that’s the group that we might benefit by helping them deliver learning content without having to do much search. IF we do a good job at that, we can retain them to YT for professional learning stuff vs. loosing them to Coursera’s of the world.

While you followed the structure well and you get kudos for laying out wireframe ..

1) I don’t think Skill seeker should be separate fro Information seeker. To me those 2 are the same.

2) At least your Solution #1 and #2 were part of a bigger feature (call it Epic).

3) I think you should try and come up with 4-5 solutions; I struggle with this as well.

4) You should have mentioned some trade-offs.

5) Providing measures of success will be great.

Answering product improvement questions, like this one, often starts with asking the interviewer for clarification. In this case, I would ask them to clarify what they mean by improvement and if they have a particular metric in mind or I can chose the metric.

Let’s assume they say that ‘time spent on watching YouTube videos’ is an indication of engagement in the platform and my goal is to drive engagement by increasing the time spent on watching YouTube videos per user.

I can think of a few YouTube user groups with unique needs and requirements. Here is a list of some of them:

– Entertainment seekers: They are looking to kill some time by watching entertaining videos
– Skill seeker: They are looking to learn how to do something (e.g. How to make a drill in the wall)
– Information seeker: They would like to learn about a new topic to educate themselves (e.g. biology of dolphins)
– Event follower: They want to watch a live video of a current event or listen to news / analysis about an event
– Children: parents using YouTube Kid movies to entertain their children

There are many more user groups that are out there. I’ve only listed a few here. I’m going to first pick a particular user group to focus on. While I think YouTube is doing well in many user groups, Google should be particularly feeling threatened by Facebook’s success in getting the attention of the Entertainment Seekers. These users are spending a lot of time on Facebook to browse through videos liked / shared / commented by their network of Facebook friends and spending less time on YouTube so I’m going to focus on this particular user group.

The Entertainment seekers have a few unique needs:

– They are interested in videos that entertain them
– Long videos won’t be interesting to them because they require a lot of commitment
– They usually decide quickly if the video is interesting to watch or they move on and continue their search
– They don’t know what they want to watch and need the provider to suggest the right content
– They want to know about the videos that people they trust have found them funny

There are many other unique attributes to this user group. I think the last one mentioned is the most important need among this group and one reason that Facebook has been doing so well in videos is that users can easily find videos that their friends find interesting to watch. If I like the taste of comedy of my friend, I will be more likely to be watching that video. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t currently have a way of enabling users to easily discover videos that are found interesting by their trusted network.

Here, I’m going to list a few ideas that can potentially help improve YouTube video discovery experience for this group:

– Enable users to add friends to their network of friends so that if one watches a video interesting, it appears on a person’s video home page
– Email a list of videos popular among friends to the user
– Enable friends to privately share / recommend watching videos with each other so that next time the recipient of the recommendation comes to YouTube, they can see a video suggested by a friend

Now, I will evaluate each of the ideas by using two criteria of impact on customer experience and cost of implementation.

Feature 1 – high impact on customer experience, high implementation cost
I think this is a great idea and can add significant value however, the implementation of this project takes a lot of time and resources because the system is only good once many users start adding people to their network. This is a difficult to complete task given many users are passive and are not willing to take actions such as adding friends.

Feature 2 – medium impact on customer experience, low implementation cost
This idea can be easily implemented however, the impact is medium because it’s not easy to determine who are the people who would potentially find the video interesting.

Feature 3 – high impact on customer experience, low implementation cost
This feature can have a large impact on customer experience because users are being the judge of which videos are interesting to watch for their friends. They can do this better than algorithms today. In addition, this feature is fairly easy to implement. The development team will just have to add a “share with friend” option that will be used to share a video with a particular person in the YouTube environment so that next time they are in the YouTube channel, they watch the video. This feature can also be expanded over time to encapsulate a feature such as feature 1.

Out of the features listed above, I would recommend developing the feature 3 as a way to improve YouTube. This feature will also be a direct competitor to Facebook and can potentially encourage some people who currently open their Facebook app to find interesting content to switch back to YouTube for finding interesting content.

To start the project small and build an MVP, I will add a new tab on YouTube and call it “friends’ sent videos”. When I click on this link, it will show videos my friends have shared with me. In addition, when someone shares a video with a user, a notification email can inform the user that a video is waiting for them to be watched. By initially focusing on private sharing of videos with individuals, Google can hit the ground up and running right away even though people do not have network of YouTube friends to share content with. To ensure the feature is used more frequently by the users, it’s important to make it simple and intuitive to share content with people. There are different ways to do this. One approach is to have YouTube present a list of friends I might want share the video with at the end of my video. I will just have to click on their names and video is shared with them. It will also be useful to the sender if they can add a personal message to video they are sharing.

This feature can expand over time to additional features such as group sharing, paving the way for Google to play a more serious role in a segment Facebook is currently dominating.