Day — 2 Google Product Interview Preparation

 

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1. How would you improve Microsoft PowerPoint?

Interviewer: How would you improve Microsoft PowerPoint?

Shailesh: Thanks for the question, first let me clarify my understanding of Microsoft PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint is a tool to build presentations. It comes with several add-ins tools that can be used for enhancing PPTs making experience. You can also collaborate the work with your colleagues,, and real-timereal-time editing of PPTs decreases the time taken to make presentations. Is my understanding clear or do you want me to discuss some other aspect of Powerpoint?
Interviewer: I think we are aligned on this.

Shailesh: Now coming back to the question, improvement is a very broad term and it can be of different types, if tie this term to the business objective, then we can have improvement as in more acquisition, more engagement or more money. So what is the purpose of improving PowerPoint? According to my, we can think of more monetisation because PowerPoint is there for a very long time and I think it has kind of surpassed the peak of the growth phase so we can think of getting more revenue. Are we aligned on this?
Interviewer: Yes you can go ahead with more revenue.

Shailesh: One more question: Is there any resource or time constraint I should be aware of? I am asking this question because it may play an important role while prioritising our features.
Interviewer: No, you are not bound by that.

Shailesh: Okay so let me quickly summarise whatever we have discussed till now and form a goal of the problem, We want to improve the monetisation of the Microsoft Powerpoint and any constraints do not bind usany constraints do not bind us.
Interviewer: Sounds good.

Shailesh: Cool, the way I would like to approach this problem is, first will see our customer segment and their user journey and, depending on that, will see some of the pain points. After prioritizing the pain points, we can see potential solutionspotential solutions and corresponding success metrics. At last, we can think of some of the potential tradeoffs or some future aspects of the Solution. Sounds okay?
Interviewer: Sounds Great, please go ahead.

Shailesh: There can be different user persona of people who are using PowerPoint

User Persona

1. Students who use the PowerPoint for more personal use or in colleges making PPTs. PPT making is a very laborious task so they want a quick way to get it done.
2. Professors who use the PowerPoint to teach students, since students in the class have lower attention span in general so they want to communicate their explanation in a unique way.
3. Business leaders/TedX Talker/Salesman who use PowerPoint presentations for more professional use want to crack a deal or make a sales pitch to some VC investors, they want their PPTs to be near perfect.

Shailesh: All can have a potential pain point to solve and monetise it but the customer segment which I want to target is the one who is business leaders/TedX Talker/Salesman, they are using it for professional use so it will be easy for us to monetise the solution for them. what do you think about this?
Interviewer: Yes the assumption seems okay.

Shailesh: So now slet’s think of their user journey toto think of their potential pain points.

User Journey

1. Already got the idea, now think of how to make the PPT that would be contextually relevant and aesthetically pleasing
2. Making the content of the PPT and completing it in several iterations
3. Practising the content in the PPT of how to communicate it
4. Analysing how to connect the audience with the visuals in the PPT

Shailesh: Depending on that, let’s think of the potential pain points.

Pain Points

1. Searching the template and editing the template to make it contextually relevant is such a painful task.
2. Making the PPT is a boring and laborious task, a single change can ruin your PPT’s aesthetics.
3. Thinking of the content and the pitch requires a lot of time.
4. Practising and getting honest feedback is not very easy while rehearsing the pitch.
5. Making a connection between the audiences and the visuals in the PPT is not very easy, sometimes numbers don’t make sense to the gravity of the situation to the audiences.

Shailesh: Now let’s prioritise the different pain points, I would like to see the intensity and frequency of the problem while prioritizing the problem. It will make sure that we cover the pain points' breadth and depthcover the pain points' breadth and depth. So according to me, we can try to solve pain points #2 and #3 because they are the ones that come first and then we will go on solving #4 and #5. There are many paid templates available thatmany paid templates available that can solve pain point #1. So I would want to solve #2 and #3 first. Are we aligned on this?
Interviewer: Yes that makes sense.

Shailesh: Now lets’ think of some of the solutions.

Solutions/Feature sets

Solutions to pain point #2

1. Powerpoint can have a feature that can tell beforehand where I I should put the box and content in the PPT, making it, making it visually appealing. [Mid effort][High Impact]
2. There can be a voice over feature in which you don’t need to try several iterations to check where the image will look good, you can tell the voice assistant “Flip the textual box and the image”, and see if it makes sense to flip the textual box and image. [Mid effort][Mid Impact]
3. There can be a feature called “Magic PPT” in which you need to dump the content in the slide and, after clicking the button it will properly indent the whole content and present it in a more aesthetically pleasing way.[High Effort][High Impact]

Solutions to pain point #3

1. Powerpoint can have a “pitch builder” feature, feature, which will make a pitch for you depending on the content in the slides. [Mid Effort][High Impact]
2. Powerpoint can have a pitch and PPTs marketplace in which people who have nailed the pitch to the VCs can post their PPTs and pitch and you can see how they got success and you can probably implement that. Since Powerpoint has so many active users,, getting the network effect would be a bigger problem. [Mid Effort][Mid Impact]
3. Powerpoint can have a feature “Pitch Expert”, in which you can have personalised suggestions from the industry experts on how to build the pitch for your work. [Mid Effort][High Impact]

Prioritisation

Shailesh: I think we can build feature #1 for pain point #2 and feature #1,#3 for pain point #3. I think the professional people will be able to give money for these features.

Shailesh: Now we can think of the success metrics, to track if our solution is actually working or not.

Success Metrics

1. Average revenue per user (ARPU), Monthly revenue run rate
2. Average number of pitches built by pitch builder in a month.
3. Average number of booking of experts in a month

2. How would you improve Gmail?

Interviewer: How would you improve Gmail?

Shailesh: Thanks for the question, first let me clarify my understanding of Gmail. Gmail is a free mailing service by Google through which you can send emails to anybody. It has features which segregate different types of emails and autocompletion of texts in mails. Is my wholistic understanding of Gmail is okay or do you want me to think about any specific section of Gmail?
Interviewer: No it is good.

Shailesh: Okay, I have some questions that I want to clarifyquestions that I want to clarify before going ahead. My first question is what’s the goal of improvement or if I tie it to the business objective, is it an improvement in acquisition, engagement or revenue part? I think almost all people use Gmail either in a personal way or professional way, so engagement and revenue both can be a good thing worth exploring. Do you have any preference for anything?
Interviewer: I want you to go more on the engagement aspect.

Shailesh: Alright, increasing engagement can also help us get a different revenue streams for money in future. One more thing, are we considering increasing engagement on any specific platform like desktop or mobile? or any preferred geography.
Interviewer: You can go ahead with the desktop application and we want to increase the engagement globally.

Shailesh: My last question, do we have any resource or time constraints for this? I am asking this question because it may play an important role in prioritising the features.
Interviewer: No you are not bound by that.

Shailesh: Let me quickly reiterate the goal from what we have discussed till now, we want to increase the engagement on web Gmail globally and any resource and time constraint do not bind usany resource and time constraint do not bind us.
Interviewer: Perfect

Shailesh: Cool, the way I would like to approach this problem is, first will see our customer segment and their user journey and, depending on that, will see some of the pain points. After prioritizing the pain points, we can see potential solutions and corresponding success metrics. At last, we can think of some of the potential tradeoffs or some future aspects of the Solution. Sounds okay?
Interviewer: Sounds Great, please go ahead.

Shailesh: There can be different user persona of people who are using Gmail like students, teachers, working professionals or for personal use but if I have to put the customer persona in a more MECE way, I would list down the following

User Persona

1. Power Users: They are the ones who heavily rely on the Gmail like working professionals, students/teachers in college having Gmail as the mail mailing service. They compose and receives tons of messages daily.
2. Regular Users: They are the ones who uses Gmail for their personal use, they have subscribed to quite a lot of channels or newsletters, so they want to read through them.
3. Casual Users: They are the ones who generally doesn;t use Gmail much, they only use the service for a few purposes like filing a complaint to customer care, writing bank applications etc.

Shailesh: Since our target is to increase engagement on the platform,, I would like to focus on the power users because increasing engagement for them would increase engagement at a greater level.

Shailesh: let’s think of the customer journey of the prioritised user so that we can think of their pain points.

Customer Journey

1. Users receive an email in their inbox, either they opened the mail and read it or if they don’t open it gets accumulated in the inbox.
2. They want to refer to the previously received email, so they search for it.
3. They want to reply to some email or send an email to a completely unknown person for the first time, so they start composing it and and attach the file if they need to.
4. After composing the mail, they do the sanity check for the same, if they have done anything wrong or tone is correct or not.
5. They send the email and wait for the reply if it is kind of urgent.

Shailesh: Depending on that, let’s think of the potential pain points.

Pain Points

1. Composing and sanity checking an email take a very long time.
2. Reading a long mail chain in which you have been added lately is painful.
3. People incorporate get so many emails and are not able to filter out which ones should be looking at first priority and which are not useful as in (email in which people add another person by just appending +1)

I think all of the pinpoints are worth exploring if I have to choose one I would like to choose the pain point #1 and #2 because the intensity and frequency associated with this is quite high, are we aligned on this?

Interviewer: Yes you can go ahead with this.
Shailesh: Now let’s look for the solutions for pain points #1 and #2.

Solutions

Solution for pain point #1

1. Gmail can have a feature “Tone detector” which can detect the tone of the message and make it more contextually relevant and tailored to the audiences type. [High Effort][High Impact]
2. Gmail can have a feature “Mail composer” which can compose the message by the help of the audio. [High Effort][High Impact]

Solution for pain point #2

1. Gmail can have a feature “Mail Summariser” which will help you to comprehend the summary of the long chain thread of some email. [High Effort][High Impact]
2. Gmail can have feature “Mail Reminder” which can help the person to remind the deadlines, for example let’s say we have a mail in which the deadline is set till end of the day, in this case the deadline to reply should be automatically set in the calendar. [High Effort][High Impact]

Shailesh: Let’s think of the success metrics

Success Metrics

1. Average number of changes done to from the suggestion given by “Tone Detector” per month
2. Average number of words dicted using voice assistant while composing mail per month
3. Average number of time Mail summariser is used per month