Designing a Google Product for the Olympics - Product Manager Group Practice Interview

Key Takeaways

okay okay recording started so we'll be sharing the video with the pm community um i also asked that we only follow one rule in this group practice session which is a user assigned button on zoom to raise your hands if you'd like to share your thoughts um the question that we're going to do together is design a google product for the olympics so what are we gonna do first who has some ideas on what to do as a first step okay go ahead thank you so much for raising your hand hey manchu what would we do yeah lastly clarification question since this is a google product so uh just want to see we are trying to design a product for the audience who are attending the olympics or the organizers or the player who are participating in the event got it okay that's a good question who are you designing for is this for the audience or organizers um let's say that we're going to design this for the audience okay thank you okay any other questions you'd like to ask me uh let me give a minute and maybe i'll come back sure sounds good all right go ahead yeah um i it's more of like a suggestion uh rather than a clarifying assumption i am thinking uh in designing this product i would like to leverage google's existing uh competency and expertise and maybe even leverage some of its various products to sort of bring a cohesive uh product experience or a new product that is specifically used uh you know um that specifically caters to the specific uh to this situation so was that okay or yeah so um first of all to answer your question yes that's okay now i want to also add that you know i think you should assume that you're expected to do that right because the questions are designed in the google product for the olympics so you know my answer to you is yes that's totally fine but i would say if i was you i would just like kind of make that assumption and even if you're going to present it like i would just like kind of say it with more confidence i'd be like okay given that we're saying like design a google product i'm going to assume that it's going to be one of google's products and therefore it's going to kind of take advantage of like what google is very strong at which is like organizing data and then kind of like move on right um like it would be kind of expected i would say given as a google product that you're kind of leveraging you know google's core competencies so i'm just like highlighting that so that um you know it doesn't come across as you you're kind of discovering this rather than um yes it is of course i'm going to be doing that you know what i mean yeah yeah that makes sense yeah okay all right um anything else any other questions anybody would like to ask me vinay go ahead i don't have a question but i would actually start off by reviewing the fit to google's mission with respect to what's happening especially in this case i mean when there's olympics there's a lot of people there there's uh people who are participating players who are participating in the olympics they're people who are attending the olympics and they come in with a lot of information there right which is like they want to navigate to the stadium they want to click pictures they want to share pictures uh they want to like uh shop around they want to actually travel to get to the olympics uh um which we're in so this tells me that there's a lot of flow of information across uh there's some um you know google products that are already present in that in in that space in the form of google photos google travel google maps and then to help people like find the right businesses for shopping for reading google ads so there's clearly a lot of information and there's a significant opportunity to kind of organize this information and make it useful so there is like a perfect uh fit for google uh with respect to like doing something at the olympics all right okay thank you so much for sharing that and i wrote down some of those things i think you're totally right i totally agree with you like kind of providing a context of it um you mentioned that first you're going to talk about google's mission but then we talked about the olympic context of olympics for the audience um it's okay to talk about the context of olympics i just want to say if you're kind of thinking about was mentioned don't forget to highlight that like kind of say you know the way i think about it is that google's mission is like you know organized data right and then go on and say now in this context the way i think about it is that you know in olympics there are different user groups we've decided we're focusing on the audience or people and by audience what i mean is like people that are there to like watch the olympics and i can think about a bunch of pain points when i think about their user experience or user journey and you kind of highlighted a few of them so i just want to make sure that you know you're kind of giving a clear indication to the interviewer that you're going through this like kind of thought process of first i'm just going to remind myself that google's mission is organizing data and now i'm going to think about the olympics user experience olympics user journey from the lens of data right and then you kind of go through that user journey of an audience attending the olympics to watch games like what sort of needs they have and things like that does that make sense dude that makes a lot of sense that is a great point and the reason i was trying to refrain from the mission i'm so sorry i think this is my bad is that i was doing mocks and then at some point became too cliche to say it's the mission and go from there but i can see how it can come across that you're not even talking about the mission so yeah and to be honest like if it's cliche to you in a mock interview imagine how much of a cliche it's gonna be to the interviewer when they hear the word mission i almost feel like if somebody uses the word mission it almost is an indication that they were too nervous about this interview about not performing well that they over practiced exactly right so ideally you don't even use that word and you ideally you just say well i know google is in the business of organizing data yeah and i want to think about it from the lens of data right it's a lot more you know casual and a lot more kind of exactly conversational so just like something to keep in mind yeah the other thing that i recently is something i read i mean the google i o sudha which i was saying uh he said like it's to organize the world's information convert the information to knowledge and make the knowledge more accessible right so something like i've been searching what you said it makes sense right just instead of mission just saying business because to your point absolutely right the interview at the moment you hear the word mission they're like yes this is epic yeah yeah and you know the other thing is like also remember um that mission part is a very very small part of the interview right um it's okay if we sometimes don't completely nail one part like you know what the mission is and all that it's more about can we design a product right as a product manager we're going to be designing a google product can we design a google product like what do we need to do to design a google product we need to know who we're building for what sort of problems they have right what are the solutions to those problems right and how are we going to go build it so it's kind of important to keep that context in mind of like what's the ultimate goal okay so we're 15 minutes into the session i'm going to continue a little bit we talked a little bit about the context of like google olympics for some of the um you know olympics uh audience or olympics watchers let's say um what else can we say about that like i mean we're kind of like skipping a little bit like we kind of went from clarifications immediately to the user grouping we said okay we're just going to focus on the audience um and we started talking about the user journey of the audi dead people that are attending that's totally fine um but let's spend a little bit time on that and like kind of think a little bit about um what are some of the things that come to our mind when we when we think about uh somebody attending um the olympics and like watching the olympics uh go ahead a minute uh i do have a clarifying question um that i know that we actually did talk about uh attendees or probably the viewers uh organizers but apart from attendees they can be people who are actually viewing online i'm like think about olympics as a global event right whole world is actually connected to it and if you look at google mission when we design a product we normally want to scale it to a billion user so really good point you brought up i'm so glad that you brought this up now i want to ask a question how would you as a as a leader right as a product leader how would you instead of turning it into a question for me how would you make an statement and still give me a chance to correct you if i disagree with you yeah so the way that i would probably think about it is i'll probably say that um the way uh google is a global company um and there are a lot of products that actually touch uh that a normal human being touched on a day-to-day life be it like search maps or photos or or anything uh so i believe i think one of the google mission is to make sure that the product we designed it eventually scales to a billion people so i think i would not limit it just to the users who are attending i'll probably even think about probably users who are viewing um because that is where i believe google probably has more capability to kind of serve the people with the unmet needs and i can definitely go talk about some of the pain points yeah got it and you know i think here you you kind of showed your decisiveness in my opinion like you explained you were thinking behind why you're gonna actually pick one particular type of user group right and you you could all like and you kind of left it open for me to disagree with you as well i mean you could have said i'm happy to change if needed but um i think it makes sense when you go down that path that's kind of what you implied and i think that's really good because you're showing that you have your independent way of thinking and you came up to a conclusion but at the same time you're flexible enough that you're giving me a chance to actually say you know what i've decided i'm just gonna let's just like focus on something else right let's focus on another user group um so okay so that's a that's a very good point so okay so we've decided that we're gonna focus on basically maybe the audience um and not necessarily by audience we mean like people attend visiting the the city or the country that the olympics is happening it's basically um you know anybody who's um an audience of the olympics right um okay so what do we do next what's next here now that we have like this additional piece of information who's interested in kind of helping me thinking about what to do next go ahead amit i'm thinking we can further sub segment those user group we can think about i'm like because this is a broad user group people who are actually our audience we can think about people who uh who are like um uh who who want to kind of uh know about uh the know-how of the of of the olympics and they didn't get the chance to kind of attend that in person uh okay people who so something like i'm like who um who probably have a passion to kind of be in touch with the what is happening around olympics on a day-to-day basis second would be i'm like probably a casual person who probably just want to know i'm like at the end of the day i'm like what is happening in the olympics and the third user group can be something like which probably don't care anything with respect to olympics and through that we can talk about particular user group that we can target based on the impact that can be created through the product that we're gonna design or the frequency that they're gonna use uh based on unlike the product because olympics is something which is like half there's so many games there's so many things which are happening right so they probably will be like getting updated on a hourly basis also got it so thanks for sharing that i met um i'm curious what was the first user group i got the second one and the third one you said the second one is the casual first yeah second one was casual third one was which they basically don't uh care about olympics so first one is basically i'm like who want to be in touch with olympics uh with regards to what is happening there right so we can probably put into a better words um something like like a power user or something which is uh uh which has a hobby or um like uh it's a key avid uh viewer of what is happening in the olympics on a regular basis getting that word yeah that that's fair okay so i think i think it's fine the way you kind of thinking about it like the three user groups at a very high level now one thing i would say though is the third user group is not so much of a user group they're not really a user because they're not using them um so i would pretty much like ignore it right i think it's okay for you to ignore it um let me know if you disagree and why but um that's that's kind of my thinking is like you know it's like saying like who are the users of a car um we would think about like the drivers um you know the passengers and then maybe we would say like people that don't they're not in the car you know what i mean like it's almost like irrelevant like we don't care it's only about people that are interacting with the car those are the people that we really care about um okay so i'm curious to know if that makes sense otherwise um i can see vinay you raise your hand yeah sure so there's one more segment of users that i was thinking about which is you know olympics also as a social event you know there's friends who go to the olympics and uh there are groups of fans right uh who go to olympics for a sport for a country uh who could not go either due to the fact that one of them or most of them they could not get a ticket for this for the game or even they couldn't plan their travel with things like covet and now monkey parks going on in the world right so that's the reason the user group that i can think about is like a group of users like a group of fans who are who were pretty passionate but who couldn't make it to the philippix got it um now i agree with you i would say one thing to keep in mind is that ideally when you're thinking about user groups you want to make sure that your user groups are mutually exclusive from each other as much as possible right and the reason i'm saying this is like you you want to kind of think about how you're like segmenting the users in one spectrum right um so for example right now the user group that you highlighted could actually still be part of the other two user groups of like people that are you know power users um really following olympics and or people that are like you know casually trying to stay in touch like maybe they belong more to the power user group so i just want to kind of like make sure that when we're thinking about user grouping um we're thinking about like kind of unique user groups as much as possible because um at any time we can really uh you know slice and dice the data in so many different ways and segment the data in different ways and sometimes where people like kind of you know struggle with is like you know for example give an extreme example to kind of like communicate my my view on this like you don't want to say um there are people in the age range of like 20 to 30 and then there are power users right sure these are two different user groups but they're not mutually exclusive right um somebody could be a power user and also belong to that code that was kind of an extreme example i gave to kind of communicate that view um just want to make sure that we're kind of clarifying that just love for your guidance here maybe yeah just love your thoughts uh i think the the group that i was thinking about i agree with you there's an overlap with the first line there but the third segment is actually not a single user but it's a group of people like group of friends uh or a group of supporters of a sport team who are usually there for a social experience more for a social experience of being together cheering for their team together or you know just as friends to go to the uh olympics do you still think that would count as an overlap the reason that i've said is like if if we go after that segment for instance what we saw may be very different from what we saw for the first first segment because if you really go after this segment then creating that social experience may be like super valuable so that's what i was thinking about but love to hear your thoughts too yeah i think uh i see where you're coming from i think there's still a little bit of a too much of an overlap so i would uh still be on the cautious side um because then okay so what you're doing is here you're really kind of highlighting the fact that they're extreme on the um social communication attribute right so then you want to make sure you have another user group um that's not so strong on social communication electronic right i'm trying to keep it very simple and you know you could you could do that you could have like different user groups with different needs i'm just trying to kind of keep this in mind that we really have 30 minutes during the interview you want to keep it really simple right so ideally like you do a very very simple grouping you kind of move on okay so we have limited time i'm going to assume that we're going to go with the casual users right um that are trying to stay up to date with what's going on um can somebody tell me why i would pick casual versus power users maybe emmett would you be interested in just like telling me real quick yeah yeah absolutely and just allow me another 10 seconds when i was thinking about user group probably we can think about people who are attending in-person and uh and offline and within often we can have which are power users who wanted to be always up to date and versus the casual users so if we have to really kind of pick a casual users the reason why we'll pick up will be the tam because that is the highest dam and uh and in terms of frequency i think it is something which will be low but impact of the mission will be high because you know these are the people who probably don't want to get updated on a regular basis i'm like because the power users may find a way to kind of get update on the olympics through other channels but uh casual users are the one who actually uses google products on a day to day basis and that is where we can probably make an impact got it okay that's perfect sounds good thank you so much for showing up um we're gonna move to uh so now we've decided we're gonna kind of focus on like people that are interested in like kind of staying updated with what's going on with the olympics um you know they're not power users they're not like you know big fans of like olympics and like trying to really stay updated with everything that's going on but um this is a user group right so what do we do next so now that we've identified the user group what's the next step what is the next thing that we should do like who can help me kind of move forward from here okay perfect i provide you right so let's think about the needs of this user what are some of their needs would you be able to help or somebody else who's interested yeah i can i can talk about it so i think one of the things a casual user might care about is they probably are not following all of the games they maybe you know somebody like me who just cares about let's say figure skating right and that's all i care about so i would want to know what are the key events happening in figure skating that i would care about most likely maybe where us has participated right so being able to get a tailored schedule of the events i would care about right and also being able to access the event to view that event remotely so in a way it's kind of two needs first so that i can sort of move my own schedule around to be able to view these events and then second is to be able to view these events got it so i think these are these are two great um user needs like kind of being able to tailor them like to your needs and also ability for you to to watch the ones that you're interested in i think on the watching the ones that you're interested in there's maybe like um some more information like what what else can okay i meant go ahead you raise your hand we'd love to hear your thoughts on yeah yeah so i think apart from uh what she mentioned on the two user needs i think i'm just thinking along the similar lines since olympics have so many games i think it's a great opportunity for people to learn more about different games at the same time right because i'm like maybe i'm i don't know about that sport at all and this is something that i can probably give my my kid or myself a kind of a little bit awareness and i can actually kind of bring that sport to my home so how would you describe that as a pain point or as a need i don't disagree with you i think it's a i think it's an interesting point you're bringing bob i just want to make sure that we're always thinking about it from the perspective of the user need so i would probably say that olympics normally happens like once in two years to four years which is where most of the games i'm like which are played around the world are brought in we normally as a kid or as a as a parent are being exposed to like me i'm like limited amount of games this is an opportunity to learn or kind of become a fan of the new games um and and bring uh some um kind of awareness and happiness or excitedness you're talking about opportunity i'm talking about user pain point um and i'm sorry how about the rules for example for example how about the rules i'm like i'm probably following a game but i don't know about the rules okay i think like kind of approval mentioned something like maybe need to explore new spores i was also thinking like maybe i'm curious to learn more about other sports i would like to learn more about other sports right like you're kind of like specifically talking about um like a need that that humans have um during that time because once we know that we know what that underlying need is it's a lot easier for us to think about some can i add a little bit to that bishop just to tailor it and tailor the same point like i i i think it's nice uh that people would i would want to learn about new games but honestly if i'm thinking i would care about which are the new games where us is doing great right so like being able to sort of uh narrow down my interest like i i i wouldn't be able to keep like learn about hundred types of games or even decide how from these hundred games which ones would i be interested in like that's a lot of work so so instead like uh to uh amit's point maybe uh the need to know uh about uh where my country or whatever like where uh my group or my friends my friends are following some specific games then like i can put in those preferences and then i can add those new sports or new games to my internet okay so um i want to go to um lane in a second uh but i just wanted to quickly um say that the way i i added some more context here is like i said i'd like to learn more about other sports and events um that will be interesting to me right like it's kind of more like like to a point i want to know like the things that are interesting for example like when canada started doing well and like i don't know like basketball for example um i was like very excited i was like oh i said i'm interested in like sports you know i was always so interested in basketball um so i think that's kind of like the idea and then i also added that um you know kind of along the lines of like your interest in like specific areas i'd like to know how my country is doing in certain sports right um okay so continue lane go ahead yeah yeah i can say about that um so as somebody who um you know i know a lot of people that i know are really excited about soccer or football wherever you come from um and i really don't understand the rules look i don't understand what offside means and that kind of stuff so like you know when i see people really excited about like our team took silver and soccer and i'm like well i don't know what that means you know like i think that that could be a pain point um and then they're knowing the kind of the the rules of the game yeah like what's like what is that game even about right like what's going on okay chocolate yeah yeah um so uh yeah um and then i i guess a point that i've had about the olympics is that um uh i get a lot of alerts um all the time about this country has taken this thing or whatever i'm like guys i don't want to know every time something happens i just want like top line where the highlights for today at the end of the day that's all i want got it so you have basically i'm busy um i just want to know um the the highlights right um of what's happening okay fair enough thank you so much for adding that i added the two of them um i want to go to tina because tina hasn't spoken much yet so tina go ahead sorry i forgot to lower my hand lane just lane just took my idea thinking along the similar lines of like why are they casual users probably because they don't have a lot of time to invest in watching the olympics so i wanted to get us that's a good point although she couldn't have taken your idea she probably came up with it herself because she hadn't heard your idea yet but yes yes okay sounds good so um we've come up with a few ideas we've come up with a few pain points i'll go to approval and then after that um we're going to continue and move forward go ahead approval yeah i think uh basically to the same uh point that lane and tina were mentioning i think uh uh the time is limited and i might be interested in like three four different events that are happening simultaneously so even if i have the time i can't watch four events at the same time so then uh what to do like i you know so if there is a system like if so a mechanism to help me keep updated on what's happening in basketball at the same time what's happening in gymnastics that's great right so i know or at least i know which one to focus on like maybe you know like oh i have this one hour but now i don't know which one should i which even should i watch so if i know some more excitement is happening in with the gymnastics i'll i'll pick that something like that so i'm going to put this actually under like you know they're interested in like some specific areas because i think it's kind of related to that um now i think underneath the pain points that you highlighted there is also um this pain point that you kind of hint to that which is maybe i would like to be informed of the most interesting events to watch right like it's kind of like okay there's a lot of to your point you know gymnastic um events happening a lot of competitions there's a lot in basketball everything else but i really want to know the most interesting ones to watch right exactly because i probably don't have the time to watch home right um so i want to watch the most interesting parts of the most interesting to me right yeah parts of the olympics and and that's to be honest that's an interesting problem and it's not always easy to solve right um okay cool so we're gonna have to continue because we have limited time um you can imagine we can spend a lot of time like thinking a lot of about we can think about a lot of other pain points um what do we do here like so now we've come up with a bunch of you know user needs or pain points we can call them uh what's the next thing for us to do um i put i'm going to assume that your hand is up from the last round so i'm going to lower it but feel free to raise it again um himanshu what do you think we should do next actually i wanted to mention a pin point um but uh if you are moving ahead uh i think it's okay go ahead if you can share it real quickly i'll add it and then yeah the one pin point i was thinking um along the same lines which uh um these guys mentioned um is olympics are happening in different countries so i may not be in the same time zone so even though i have let's say what i mentioned like you know i have interest in certain games i belong to certain country but i can't watch it that game because of the time difference so maybe maybe i want to watch it but i can't because it's happening during late hours or at the night right that's one pinpoint so how what's uh how would you describe the pain point like you can you can watch it if you want um i just want to make sure that you you're describing it as a user need right and it has to be something that's unique from what's in this list right because we already got a few so watching the olympics event or a sport live um well they're not live they're not live because you don't want to watch at that time you're saying yeah it's happening during my off hours so got it okay cool okay so let's continue i really want to move forward um we have to um kind of go to the next steps we're we're almost like you know 20 minutes left to the end of session uh what do we do next uh lane would you be able to guide us into next step yeah we want to prioritize the pain points okay sure we can prioritize the pain points how would you do that what's what's the fastest way in your opinion to do this uh i'm gonna say probably impact to the user got it so can you describe like you know quickly imagine like i'm kind of like in two minutes or one to two minutes tell me your thoughts on like you know which pain points are the most important ones for us to focus on um i'm going to say that um getting a tailored view if you're a casual um view uh user then you um just really want to filter out the information and not be barraged um uh and then see uh probably the highlights i may be biased that was my idea um but it's sort of a similar thread right um i'm busy i'm just a casual user i just want to see what's most interesting to me and what the most important things that happened today god okay um sounds good and you know i think it might be worth kind of mentioning this i i always say this in like product design product improvement sessions to avoid a situation where people think there's only one way to answer these questions it's totally fine to prioritize the pain points i do that myself sometimes but it's also okay to say you're going to go into the solution think about a solution for each section for each pain point and then pick the ones that you think are most interesting i personally like lane's approach because it helps you stay focused just on the pain points that are the most relevant and you don't end up spending so much time thinking about pain points that you're not gonna focus on right it actually allows you to also think about multiple solutions for um one particular pain point and that's great right like it kind of shows that you're really thinking about it from um you know user journey perspective and you're the kind of a pm that can think about different ideas um so i just wanted to kind of highlight that and sounds good but you know if you had more time yes like we would kind of dig more into like what are the different trade-offs i think it's totally fine to say i think these two have like the biggest impact because i can imagine it's relevant to everybody um some people might have more time than others so it's probably hard to like exactly know what the right level is there but um everybody wants to get a tailored view and everybody wants to get some sort of a highlight um so let's just like kind of dig into that and see if we can think about some ideas so that sounds good um let's move forward what do we do next so we've got like some kind of a couple of pain points that we've decided we're going to focus on what do we do next who's able to kind of guide me into the next step okay we'll go ahead yeah i think uh for the first pain point it's uh really gonna start the way i'm i'm envisioning this product it's more like a mobile app honestly and where i get to input my preferences so the fur like i sign up in this app and uh it would ask me what are my interests in terms of sports in terms of which countries am i supporting uh do i have any friends who are also following uh would i like to add them uh you know um i think yeah and maybe my time zone i guess if i really care about getting highlights very live or getting notifications live or something like that but these are the main things that are coming to me got it okay so um i think that's that's a one that's one product idea that saw it now i would also add that you want to make sure you're only talking about um product ideas that are relevant to the problem i think ninety percent or strong majority of what you described kind of met that the one thing that kind of like raised a little bit of an alarm in my head was like when you said um maybe i'd be able to add friends um i don't disagree with you that's a good feature but um if i want to kind of be strict about what pain point we've decided to focus on right um that pain point didn't talk so much about um you know us wanting to be able to have like some sort of social connection that is true i think i should clarify why i think of that why i thought of that feature the reason is maybe the way i tailor my experience is based on my social group and not just as because i would care about following the similar games that my friends are following which is the only reason i would want to add this feature got it it's basically a way for you to kind of like um you know identify what what is of interest to you to follow right you want it to be things that you can kind of talk about with your friends yeah it's it's not like i'm not thinking that we are going to have some sort of a fantasy betting game on some you know not like that i'm really just thinking it's going to tailor my i'll just know what to follow got it okay sounds good um so thank you so much for clarifying that um go ahead next yeah um so actually a little bit uh similar and also different in terms of the platform approach that apoorva is um i'm just thinking about like without having to build something new because i'm thinking like now like during the olympics people probably do already go on google search to search for scores so without having to build something new during the during the olympics people can probably go on google and um during that olympic time frame google can have like a specific feature that says are you watching the olympics here click here to maybe start um inputting your preferences on how you would like to stay updated and from that first step the next step with the user funnel would be to allow them to set up alerts and their notification preferences for their specific specific sports country or type of information that they want to follow what i mean by that is maybe they only want to follow the scores or medal count or maybe they want to follow like somebody just did an amazing you know stroke or something they just perform something really amazing in figure skating um click here to watch um and then from there once they set up their preferences um anytime they go back to google they're able to whether it is through a notification entry point or directly going on google they will have like a sp um a personalized dashboard that allows them to kind of read highlights for the day or for the week um of what what what went on um for the things that they're interested in so got it got it thank you so much and to be honest um this is i i think i i agree with you that this is a different product nothing wrong with that that's great that you kind of thought about another user journey right it's a completely different user journey um it's basically kind of driven by like google um taking a bit of a kind of a push approach i guess i'm inviting you when you go to google to like select your interests and then it says every time you want to use it um come to google use it now at this time i'm not gonna comment on um you know which idea i think is um you know uh superior over the others or like what we should focus on uh i think right now we're just kind of like at the ideation phase so i'm just gonna write down everything we'd love to get a couple more ideas uh from people here uh go ahead vinay yeah i mean um given that um i i might have a gmail id and google knows where i am located what my geography is uh i'm probably also on youtube and a bunch of other google products so google kind of knows what i'm watching right maybe google makes some recommendations on what i could be watching and create a schedule that's personal for me so that i don't have to go pick it because there might be a sport that's pretty popular that i don't even know that i think i should be watching um just as a pal just as a parallel if i'm like watching a lot of wrestling matches and there's some different types of wrestling at the olympics that will be of my interest right maybe google could create a personalized schedule for me and uh say that you i could watch all these uh particular sports how would i how would i as a user how would i come across that what do you think would be the like um the user journey and i think it's important for us to think about it the reason i'm saying it's important is because you know like for example you would you would go to google usually with an intent right you like usually you start with okay here's what i need i want to go to google and look for it whereas that's usually not the case for example with a platform like facebook at facebook you're kind of like i'm gonna go see what's out there right um and in this particular case of olympics um you know we're saying google is gonna give you recommendations now the question that i would have for you is like how does that content gets concealed like what's what's the interface for it where is it gonna be oh okay so i should have clarified that i think it could sit into the app that apoorva was describing before or the wherever i'm setting up my preferences i'll still have an option to set up my preferences but google can also make some recommendations but to your point about the fact that um google people go to google with what they want to search for but on facebook or tech talk it's a different story 100 agree to that i was hoping uh like some sports are pretty popular in certain demographics and gmail id gives that information and then youtube has my account information it probably has access to my watch history so based on that google could make some recommendations got it okay that sounds good so i'm going to put that under the mobile app and say like also enable uh recommendations based on user historical data right okay a recommended schedule what i could be watching when i could be watching with no conflicts so that i just know that i show up at that date time and i have something to watch and then i walk away so i don't get into the overhead of planning and figuring out where things are got it so um watching schedule okay sure um i will write this for now i think that's a separate item i'm going to write it here a separate item for now we'll come back to it later lane go ahead we'd love to hear your thoughts uh yeah so just on the topic of recommendations i can see two possible ways that you could get there one of them is through search so if you go to google search and you're searching already for games um or results or whatever then um it could um suggest you uh you know what to watch or highlights from your country or from the day whatever and then another is uh i've seen this before where google has a doodle and it encourages you to click on it and it takes you into a whole another little animated space and you know you can do different things on it and i've seen them do games and things like that um in that space so that's another possibility got it thank you so much for sharing that and to be honest the whole search part i think we can even expand on that and say um i'm just like because we have limited time i'm trying to kind of go through it a little bit quickly with helping and say there's the recommendations on google search and there's also like you can have a google search interface that is really optimized uh for the olympics right but google does that a lot google optimizes interfaces for search for like very specific use cases like for restaurant finding or for like flights or um yeah for all kinds of things so let's just say it's an optimized ux search ux for olympics information right um i think that's another idea that we can think about right and okay sounds good there are a couple more ideas that hopefully like one or two more minutes we can think about um i want to go to people that haven't spoken so much so vinay already shared his thoughts okay approval go ahead uh yeah so i was thinking of sort of connecting the first pain point like the solution for the first point point and then transitioning to the second pin point the solution for the second pin point so the way i'm thinking is once we've entered our preferences we get our we get to our dashboard right where i have gymnastics and basketball and uh let's say other sports where us is doing great right and that once i click on each tab i basically get a view of to vanessa point a should you of what past games have been what are the future games coming up where like what where where does let's say us or india wherever you know whichever country you care about stand and highlights of the past games would show up in the past so it's like a timeline right that you can scroll through and for the past games it is going to show you highlights uh i'm actually taking a little step further i'm thinking uh even a casual user might care about the whole game that has already happened right so if google can have some partnerships let's say with espn or like you know other sports channels that actually record all these games live or have recordings then user can pay and select based on the highlight select to view that event in full for you know uh like just that event right instead of buying the whole subscription for espn let's say so that's like just thinking of from monetization perspective i know that's not one of our concerns right now or we did not even define any goals but um and then for the future events you know what i would care about is uh what are the key participants right uh so it's it's sort of like schedule and highlights are sort of intermingled together in a dashboard yeah yeah fair enough okay so i just want to um i agree with you i think one thing i want to mention like you know your point is about like um it doesn't necessarily you got to make sure the idea you're staying as loyal to the problem as you can right um so i just want to kind of highlight that um himanshu let's go to you as well and i want to hear um you know any any thoughts there is anything else we could do with products is there anything we could do with like i don't know like um with youtube or like yeah google voice like there's so many other interfaces yeah i was thinking about that actually so of course google i would i mean along the same lines with uh what other participant has mentioned google has ai and machine learning so they know where the most casual users are using their products and they can you know based on like if i am a gmail user using gmail every day maybe they can advertise about you know there is an olympic going on and and uh from there the user journey can start like they can get into the search or the mobile app wherever uh we decide to build that product and second if somebody's using the sorry i just want to make sure we're sticking to we're staying loyal to the problem um the the pain points that we decided to focus on is they're interested in some specific areas right of olympics they want to stay updated with them and they want to know the highlights that are the most important things to them yeah so right so i think we should be careful about not dv like we're kind of moving towards like awareness um okay based on yeah if if they're already on the product and knowing the authentic so we can say we're based on their interest we can give them the update on their on the devices or products that they are using so if somebody's using google home they can get the update not just on the search or they can get the update on google home right as a voice um depending on which choices they have selected so google home maybe maybe create a i'm just like quickly writing it curated uh voice update of what happened let's say um during an interval at the olympics right right um okay fair enough this is and this is gonna cover uh tailored to the user's interests right um and the interest could be determined from search right right i'm just like kind of thinking about it okay cool um what else can we think about is so you know we're kind of like only four minutes uh left with the session to be honest they're like so many other ideas that we can think about that's the interesting thing about um google is like they have a kind of an interface every time there's a new type of like data that has been used by like a large number of users and basically the way we can think about it is for each of these interfaces there could potentially be a product right and then we can kind of think about each of those like there's sure mobile um but there's like videos um there's voice we talked about on their search of like kind of content that's out there in some cases we can combine some of these things um so there's all kinds of things right but given we only have like three minutes or so i'm curious to know what do we do next like imagine like we came up with like you know a bunch of product ideas we came up with like five six ideas like what do we do next as the next step um tina can you share what we do next yeah definitely for me it would be um prioritization and i would prioritize it by one level of effort and then the second one is um well i guess the second one really depends on what do we think what do we think success would be based on you know whether or not this product already exists or it's something that google is already working on so assuming that this is something that is still in a really early stage for google to develop um and improve on i would i would think that we would want to focus on adoption or acquisition of more users to engage with this product or or feature whatever it is um and from there we can look at our solutions and figure out which of those would have the highest impact to what we feel what we uh want to want to prioritize that success god got it okay sounds good thank you so much for sharing that so i kind of wrote it as um you thought about like three you know criteria um for evaluating your potential product ideas one is like the effort or use of implementation the other one is like how much impact and value it has for the user and then the third one was like you know how big of the base um is going to potentially adopt us right like because you know to the earlier point we want to really focus on ideas that can really go to like a billion people um yeah another thing i would say is i don't know if we should have clarified this in the beginning is understand if there's any constraints um that would be applied to design these solutions so whether that's like time frame or resources and that's a good point and ideally like you know we would have asked those questions i think uh we didn't ask so many like clarification questions at first but that's okay yeah um it should have been ideally asked like for example one question i always ask is like um how much time do i have like how many weekends how many engineering resources do i have right um and that's gonna have a huge impact okay so out of all this stuff based on the criteria you came up with which is like you know effort impact adoption um can you make an argument for one of these product ideas to be the right one for you to focus on like how would you how would you make that argument which one would it be yeah um i think that one of google's biggest strength is building some sort of a recommendation engine because they are they already have so much data available and that's organizing data and making something very personalized is something that they could they could get really good at um and so from the list of solutions that we've we've built or we've listed here i definitely think i would want to prioritize the recommendation engine just because it really speaks back to the main pain point that i heard um that we listed earlier is personalization is something that that was a common theme across the board so building some type of a personalized recommendation engine would be what i would prioritize and in terms of level of effort i would think that is probably medium for google again assuming i have all the resources and google has the knowledge it's one of its biggest strengths i would i would rank it at medium and i think that it would have a really high impact in terms of getting people to adopt adopt to this speaker use a recommendation engine because it really speaks to their needs um so yeah got it so um correct me if i'm wrong and the reason i'm asking is because i want to make sure we're super clear um recommendation could be delivered in so many different ways and so many different interfaces it could be delivered on like youtube um it could be delivered on voice on google search right um it could be even on a mobile app and like you kind of you go to it and it's already there um right when you think about those different interfaces which one do you think would be the one to focus on that would have like a largest impact yeah i think we could start with google search um just because i think that like you said earlier people go to google with an intent and so if they're already ready to search and we can make that step um easier for them before they even perform the search help build something really personalized um that would be a great start and then as like a secondary goal if we see you know really high success um our performance on on this initial feature launch then we can maybe think about how we spread this personalized recommendation engine across other parts of google's um product portfolio like voice assistant or youtube got it got it uh yeah totally makes sense thank you so much for sharing that and i think this is really interesting how like we kind of arrived at an answer that's like really thoughtful right like we thought about the user groups like you know what the use of implementation is that you can see there's so many ways to actually do this now if there was more time actually during the interview we might have been asked to um you know spend some time to actually do provide some wireframing right um something for us to keep in mind and maybe we would have even come up with some like metrics to measure the success of this new product that we're building but now we're over time so we'll save that for another time thank you so much everyone for attending today's session i hope you all enjoyed it enjoy the rest of your evening and we'll see you next tuesday have a good night thank you bye