How would you improve WhatsApp? [Product Management Interview Experience]

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Image source: Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash


Interviewer: How would you improve WhatsApp?

User Segment/User Personas

Shailesh: Let me think of the user personas

  1. People who are very active on WhatsApp in terms of chats, status etc. They are part of different groups, and they are our power users. But they are also using other applications like Telegram, Snapchat and they can easily migrate from one to another. E.g. — college students, young professionals etc.
  2. People who are medium in terms of usage of WhatsApp. They are part of a lot of groups but aren’t very active in group chats, but they sometimes do send documents, links etc. They want quick updates from all the chats, groups etc. E.g. — Busy Professionals
  3. People who are using WhatsApp for advertising purposes like selling their products. E.g. — Small business owners

Pain Points/Frustrations

Shailesh: Okay let’s look at the potential pain points of customer segment #3

  1. While working on a project, we tend to send important links and documents to the WhatsApp project group. It becomes very difficult to track which link corresponds to which document, and we end up downloading all the documents.
  2. In the WhatsApp group, it is generally very difficult to have focused and collaborative discussions around some topic.
  3. The textual reaction is time-consuming; for example, if I am a part of some group, as a busy user, it becomes a real pain to react to the photo via text message.
  4. Being a part of any group on WhatsApp becomes really annoying sometimes because there is a huge influx of images and my phone gets flooded with garbage.
  5. Communication with people from different backgrounds is a problem. Sometimes people in the group chat posted something in their regional language, which makes a person feels left out.

Solutions/Features

Shailesh: Okay now let’s see some of the potential solutions.

  1. WhatsApp can have one feature in which users should be able to hyperlink a particular text with a URL and this text can be searchable in the links searching section. Also, we should be able to see the preview of the doc before downloading that document. [Solution to pain point #2]
  2. WhatsApp can have its own mini browser so that whenever a person clicks on the link/URL, he doesn’t need to migrate to some other browser like Google Chrome, Safari etc. This will retain the user into WhatsApp and will increase the user engagement on the platform. [Solution to pain point #2]
  3. WhatsApp can have features like polls, forms etc. which can help in quick discussion around some topics and people's opinions can be easily gauged. [Solution to pain point #3]
  4. Facebook can extend the reaction feature to WhatsApp as well; this will help people to react to the images and the texts. [Solution to pain point #4]
  5. WhatsApp can have a group story type of features in which, rather than sending a lot of photos to the group, people can add pictures as a story and stories should also be visible on the group icon in the chat window, just like Instagram. There is no need to migrate to the status section of the app. [Solution to pain point #5]
  6. WhatsApp can have inbuilt text translation; if someone has sent the text in some regional language, then we should be able to translate it. [Solution to pain point #6]
  7. WhatsApp stored starred messages in random order, which may not be very useful while we are looking for a conversation. There can be a feature in which the user is able to bookmark the conversation and refer to it whenever he wants to visit it.
  8. WhatsApp can have more personalised GIFs and stickers. For example, if I want to send good morning to someone, it can create a gif in which the other person to whom I am sending a message and I should be present in Avatar form. This Avatar form will depend on the person's profile photo to whom we are sending the message. WhatsApp can also use VR and can also send a dynamic 3D avatar of ours to the other person in the chat. This will definitely enhance the quality of conversation because personalized emotions can communicate a lot more than text. [Moonshot]

Prioritization

Let’s prioritize the Solution, and we also know that we don’t have any resource and time constraints.

Success Metrics

Now let’s see the success metrics

  1. Increase in average amount of time the target user spends on WhatsApp per day.
  2. Increase in the average number of WhatsApp sessions the targeted user is having per day.
  3. Ratio of Average number of documents getting previewed to the total number of documents shared on WhatsApp.
  4. Bounce rate.
  5. Average number of links sent through WhatsApp with attached text per day.

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