Google Maps Product Manager Mock Interview ft. Microsoft PM

design a new feature to improve google maps [Music] hey everyone i'm kevin way i am a product manager on ibm's data and ai team and today we're doing a mock product management interview question with nathan nathan do you mind saying a few words to introduce yourself to the audience sure hey everyone my name is nathan i am currently a product manager at microsoft mixed reality and excited to do this mock awesome nathan so for today's question i'd like to ask you to design a new feature to improve google maps great awesome so just to follow up on that should the goal of improving google maps be around anything specific like engagement or revenue or impact yeah that's totally up to you for what the goal should be okay great i think let's focus on engagement i think so that will tag along a lot of other opportunities for revenue and impact so let's start there so to recap our goal will be to how can i design a feature to increase engagement for users using google maps so to start i'm going to take a bit of time to think through the different types of users who use google maps and then brainstorm a few of their pain points and try to see if we can identify which segment might make make the most sense to tackle sounds good and do you plan to design for an app or for desktop great question um i think this will likely be a mobile experience to start um and then we can potentially touch on what a desktop companion might look like but i given my assumption is that most users are using google maps on a mobile platform and i think that would make the most sense great yep thanks for laying that out okay so i think the when i think of who uses google maps the first few user groups that come to mind are those who are say like professional workers like a uber a lyft driver or a delivery driver someone who needs to navigate very frequently to different locations um so that's one category the other category of users i think are just maybe someone like myself looking for directions to go to a new gym or a new restaurant somewhere local and i think the third category of users i thought of was a group of people or someone going to somewhere a bit further away for a trip so i'm thinking if i want to spend a weekend out at somewhere i'm probably going to use google maps to see how far it's going to take to get there where i might stop on gas along the way etc so between these three groups i just thought of very top mind pain points so for the professionals um my assumption is that their main pay point is going to be looking at what are the shortest routes um you know how can i get to these various destinations in the quickest manner and maybe in a shortest manner to conserve gas um so that's interesting for the users going somewhere local i think potentially pain point would just be um like it finding where to go so maybe this could be a place where not only do they find it direct directions to a destination but it could also they could go to see where that destination is and so that's interesting but i think the third one actually encompasses that exact same pain point of the local but a lot more so i think there's a lot more involved with planning a larger trip such as you know where do i want to go where am i going to stay where i'm going to get gas where am i going to eat and it just seems like there's the most effort involved with this type of user using maps and i think this ties nicely with google's mission which is basically to organize information and make it more useful and i think there's a lot of information that google can already has with i know like their explore tab and that could maybe make this experience better for someone playing a trip so does that sound good to you yeah that sounds good let's dive into this great awesome so let me reframe where we're at right now so the objective here now is to design a feature for users going on a trip to increase engagement with google maps okay sort of like vacationers exactly vacation road tripping okay yes perfectly vacationers is the word that i will use awesome so i'm gonna take a few moments to just think about what the potential features might look like and what user experience will be okay so from a high level what i'm thinking about here is designing a new feature called like trips so i'm thinking a new tab within the mobile ux where it might be right next to the explorer icon and you click this trips tab and i'm thinking this is a one stop shop for someone to plan everything about their trip and so i've broken this down into three buckets so i'm thinking first of all would just be like high level high level aspects of the trip so when would you go is this like a multi-day trip is it over a weekend what are the dates where a user might go so is it to you know a new national park somewhere closer somewhere further away and the second bucket would be specifics so you know what specific activities a user might do are they going to go hiking are they going to go swimming um are they going to go rock climbing what whatever it might be and then where are they going to stay which hotel they might be in which airbnb might be in there might be a potential for integration there and where to get gas where to eat etc and then the third bucket is just kind of miscellaneous items such as like downloading offline maps i know that's already a feature but i think we can further optimize that given a little bit more information so just to take this one higher level what i'm thinking is google maps currently is used where a user is just actively determining where they want to go so i'm already i i should already know where i want to go before kind of typing that into google maps but they also have a function called explorer which is where a user might not know exactly what they're going to do but they just know that they want to do something right and so i'm thinking of combining the two aspects here to see if we can plan an overall itinerary using google's data to basically curate and automate the process of designing an itinerary for a trip that makes this as easy and efficient as possible so does that sound good so far can you give me an example so maybe let's say i'm in la and i want to go to vegas what would the end-to-end experience look like great perfect so that's where i'd like to go um so let's just say exactly you're currently in la and you're planning a trip to vegas so you already know where you want to go so i'm imagining you click on this trip tabs there's a button that says create new trip you click it create new trip tab and then you're able to enter potentially what you already know and then google will fill in this feature rather will fill in the rest of it for you so you already know you want to go to vegas so there's like going to be in the high level bucket i first talked about the win and the where you'll fill out las vegas as the where because you already know you want to go there and say if you already know when you want to go as well you can input that information yourself but if you just know you want to go to vegas but you don't know when this feature could potentially pull information from your calendar just you know best time to visit based off of google reviews on maps that already exist and it could suggest sometimes say based on your calendar availability perhaps a weekend trip here or a longer trip during this you know thanksgiving break or something like that and it could also suggest the best times to visit so if you're looking to go to vegas for sightseeing i i imagine you're going there for the casinos um but whatever it might be i'm assuming there's like seasonal hot spots um if it's not las vegas it's a more nature it's a you know a place you want to go hiking potentially better seasons are better and google could suggest that as well and so if you know just to recap that if you know where and when you want to go you can add that yourself but if you don't i'm thinking there's a recommendation engine feature based off of data from your personal information and other features of google such as calendar and also just aggregate user information about when the best times might be and where the best places might go that are around you and would it give me suggestions for where to get gas or where to get food or rest stops yep so that goes into the second category of specifics so once we have the high level kind of windware set in stone then we can also start to plan out the specifics and so it would be exactly like that so now we know say we want to go on a weekend trip to vegas right first of all the the google maps the strips tab will plan out what the commute will look like from your current point of death origin to las vegas right and i would imagine at this point is where we need to be a bit more specific in terms of where specifically am i leaving from where specifically will i be arriving at whether that's first at a casino or a hotel and there should be a number of recommendations of each of those buckets and i think if i can visually draw this out it would need some iterations but the simplest version would be in the specifics tab there's a few sub tabs of where to stay what to eat where to get gas and then those can be kind of clicked on and dragged and dropped into this itinerary where you might be able to see like a schedule based item and that could break out into navigation right so i imagine the first step a user will think about is where they want to stay so we could pull up a number of hotels in the area based off of reviews and this could be also a potential point of revenue generation where sponsored hotels or even partnerships with airbnb per se could have listings promoted in this in this top here the same goes for restaurants and gas so once you know where to stay you can think about what to eat it could give you the same recommendations if you know what type of genre of food you want you can tap into that indicate which type of restaurant you want and then use basically leverage a lot of the existing feature work that is already existing in the google explorer tab to help suggest um which items to do and so does that kind of make sense so high level first and then the users will think about which specifics to slot in for their itinerary yeah when in the trip planning uh i guess journey does the user use this feature is this like the day of when they're leaving to vegas or is this like a week before when they're planning okay that's that's great um so this i imagine is something both right so there's the initial planning stage which is kind of what i'm talking through now which is before they go before they even know where they want to go they're using this to plan out their entire experience right and so i wish i'd broken this up but this would be the bucket one that we're walking through and then there would also be obviously during the trip which is what will leverage most of the google maps type of interface um while they're driving to the trip and it will kind of be a streamlined version of instead of having to type in where am i going next i just finished this activity at this casino i need to navigate now to the restaurant it will already kind of have that planned in for you and if you're someone who's a bit more spontaneous it could just be the list of options already preset there and so you don't need to you know i'm going to leave at 1 pm to go each it could be whenever you're done here the next list of activities you have already brainstormed that you want to do next in your trip cool yeah this sounds pretty interesting so you said that you wanted this to be a a separate tab on the google maps app so this is a prim pretty prominent placement that we're going to roll out to our users so let's say i'm the gm at maps and i'm saying like hey nathan um this is awesome but since we're having a really prominent placement for this i want to know what your rollout plan is going to be yeah that's a great follow-up question i think definitely this feature would need validation i think it's a very ambitious plan that you know tries to upgrade google will not really upgrade but it's a feature that strives to compete against say like yelp maybe even airbnb and a lot of different competitors and so it's a very interesting opportunity space but in terms of rollout and validation i would like to start with just like a standard type of a b test and maybe not even an a b test but more of like a a focus group so just roll it out to a subs a small subset of users just to see if there's preliminary feedback that we can get and so there's two types of um studies i would do one is just discoverability so roll this feature out to a small percentage of google maps users and track metrics such as how many trips are created is that trips tab even clicked on just to see if people are interested in this feature and to see what that looks like i think the other study i would like to run in parallel is a dedicated focus group so proactively communicating out to a group of users that might sign up for beta features and explain that to them what this feature does from a high level and have them purposefully use it to provide feedback and at the same time since we know that we will have these groups of users using it we can then track secondary metrics such as you know would partners be interested in star level promotions um for um sponsor not yeah i'm just saying like could they place advertisements on the strips tab and to see if there's potential for revenue generation there but that i assume would come with networking effects as we increase these users so the primary metric would just be user satisfaction from that focus group to see if they like this feature it's something they would use and then discoverability to see if users you know just by default without any prompt would begin to use this and then just see what that looks like cool so it sounds like you want to have a more curated focus group and you also want to have a more public beta program is that right okay um is there anything else that you wanted to bring up here otherwise i might have like another follow-up question yeah so i think there's just two small things i i added to a kind of a miscellaneous bucket so i'm thinking currently there's a feature i know in google maps which is really useful if you're going out to the middle of nowhere which is downloading an offline map but the way that's done is currently just with like a circle you can just choose the radius of what you want but i think with this feature if the entire kind of like itinerary is more or less planned it could be more specific so you know if you're going on a straight shot you don't need to download an entire circle right you might just be able to download just the map area that you will plan to go on and i don't know how much space is a consideration these days given the rapid advancements in storage size but that's a potential benefit there and then the last item was just diving a bit deeper into revenue channels so i think there's a great opportunity to partner with say like airbnb even on how we can generate the best end user experience for the entire itinerary which airbnb adds the value of lodging and to see how we can share um revenue there okay cool so when i'm thinking about this feature it's definitely a big part of someone's year like you people probably only go on vacation once or twice a year so this is a big part of their life that we're kind of helping um to plan out what do you think could possibly go wrong with this uh feature yeah so when thinking through this um top of mind issues was firstly if someone does a lot of planning beforehand and let's just say that it's a family who's going and this is a very real scenario because it's happened to me before it would be that i am the trip planner because i'm the one that's more proactive in my group of friends or family and i plan on a list of itineraries even with backup options that i think if people aren't interested in these would be fallback options but there's always a probability um that the day of people aren't just feeling it and they're no longer satisfied with what was pre-planned and so this feature may not be as useful in that case if it were just a single person planning the event and that they might want to change things up spontaneously as well so that's the main kind of issue i see with this um does that kind of make sense i can try to take some time to think about a few more as well sure yeah let's take some time and think about some so i'm thinking about us a bit more my mind is still definitely going to the first one where just it's not always possible to capture for the spontaneity of a trip um i think potential other areas of failure would be just if there's not enough information or suggestions on this trip in that this might sway a user to go on a trip that may not have been the best option so with without this feature maybe they would have just like asked friends perhaps about where to go and that might have had a different end result where they ended up going on a trip together or something of that such but i think the only main category i can think of still revolves around um kind of the trip being sub-optimal as opposed to what otherwise might have happened not sure if that entirely makes sense but this was tough for me to think about cool cool um so let's take some time now and think about some metrics so so that you know this is successful awesome so i think the the two main metrics i want to track here are simply around kind of adoption and then retention and so the two metrics here would just be the number of users who have created a trip for using this tab and the other metric would be how many users make a second trip um on this tab and so i think the first one will really help track to see if people are interested in this idea to see if there's even a problem here at all to solve and then the second one would better track to see if we've adequately solved that problem and so if we see for example a large number of users creating a trip but they don't come back for a second one then we might know that we're on to something and we just need to do more user research and tweak what our product offering whereas if no one is creating the trip to begin with we might want to dive deeper on the offering entirely to see if this is worth pursuing further and one follow-up kind of intermediate metric i would track is the number of users who planned a trip and actually followed through with the trip and so kind of in that two-stage process we talked about earlier with planning and actually going through we can use location data and to see if they actually checked into the hotel or the restaurants that they have planned beforehand to see what that looks like and the other other secondary metric would be kind of satisfaction with the trip and so kind of kind of just a sentiment analysis on how was your overall satisfaction of your trip um and then that might be the overall trip itinerary might be posted to google photos social media and then to see what engagement users might go on top of that to make this more of like a social environment awesome cool so i think this wraps up our interview um i think we're ready for some feedback now this is a great answer i'm it's really awesome hearing your creative thoughts here i'm curious what sort of feedback you might give yourself at this point great well i think the the clearest one is that when you asked me about potential areas of failure i think for some reason my mind just got stuck on that single pain point and i wasn't able to kind of take a step back and think about more general items so now think about it in hindsight even now oh you know there could have been some like guardrail metrics such as is this cannibalizing engagement from the explore tab just different types of risks that might be introduced with the future outside of it itself aside from that i think i tried to articulate my answers in a few different types of buckets i don't know that they were clearly communicated across so for example in the trips tab i had a high level when and where the specifics like the restaurants the hotels and so i might have been able to do a better job on bucketing those types of categories and things that might have made it made a bit more sense and clear to communicate across yeah i really liked how you pick the vacationer use case i think that this is a pretty underserved uh use casing map since maps is pretty robust when it comes to short trips but long trips there's certainly an opportunity here and you correctly identified that um i like how you had this one solution and you went pretty deep with it and you had these different um buckets where you talked about the destination and the specific activities and the offline maps i think when it comes to risks one that came to mind when i thought of the offline maps idea is that i think the offline maps as is the reason that the circle is so big is to plan for maybe they have roadblocks and they have to take us a separate route so that's that's probably why if they don't have the offline maps of nearby uh streets then they're probably screwed because they're not used to uh the map yep totally i think that's an area i could have elaborated a bit more but that's a good call out great i mean one thing that i would add is that i think when you're doing the focus groups i would specify it maybe you had this in your mind but it might be good to specify that you might want to do a curated focus group just as a step one and then do the beta program that's public as a step two as as opposed to doing them at the same time just so that uh you're you're able to iterate uh better awesome yeah that makes sense to have a clear focus at each step yeah and i i think that it would be also good to kind of state like what your v2 version of the um feature might be and you you you kind of did get at this um you talked about how it would be good to think about monetization ideas and partnering with hotels but to me i think this is more of a v2 idea since in the beginning you stated that you wanted to focus on engagement yep absolutely um all in all this was a great answer i don't think i have anything else um thanks nathan for your time and for the viewers good luck with your upcoming pm interview thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out hundreds more videos just like this at tryexponent.com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview [Music]

Channel: Exponent

Views: 109,458

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Id: CXdaPETE7iE

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021