Design a product for people moving to a new city.

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Design a product for people moving to a new city.

Asked at Google over a year ago

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Max Hershfield · Answer 1 · 2022-09-12T23:45:49+0000

My first step in this question would be to ask some clarifying questions:

Q: Can the product be any sort of product (software, hardware, service, etc)?

A: Y

Q: Am I treating this as if I am the founder of a company and starting from scratch? Or am I a part of a smaller company, and if yes are there any other strategic initiatives I should keep in mind?

A: Treat is as if you are the founder and your starting from scratch

Q: When we say new city, should I assume the person has never lived in this place before (aka not moving back to their home town or something)?

A: Y

My next step would be to layout my framework for answering this question:

Identify some key user groups
Identify their pain points in the existing moving experience and prioritize
Brainstorm solution for top priority pain points and prioritize
Walk through user experience and talk about key MVP features
If time, identify some key metrics we can use to measure success

User Groups:

Post college graduates moving for a first job. These people typicaly do not have a lot of disposable income, want to live in areas with other people their age with restuarants, bars, etc and have little to no experience in moving. Also these people are likely renting.
Couples moving to a new city to buy a new home and settle down. These people care much more about neighborhoods, school districts, and other aspects of the city that young people don't consider. These people are also plannig to live in this home for 5-10 years rather than 1-2.

For the purpose of this question, I am going to focus on group 2 (for the sake of time and scope).

Pain Points

Pain PointsPriority

Needs a roommate fo affordability but its really hard to find quality roommates (and risky)	H
Doesn't know which neighborhods or apartment amenitites to look for (never lived on his/her own before)	M/H
Hard to find an affordable apartment	L
Really difficult to visit the apartment since he/she is still in university	H
Hard to get the application done first, since the apartment search is competitive	M
Buying new furniture etc is difficult and expensive	L
Having the furniture and utilitites set up the day of/a few days after he/she moves in is nearly impossible	L

Lets focus on the H priority items

Pain PointSolutionPriority (Impact and effort)

Needs a roommate fo affordability but its really hard to find quality roommates (and risky)	Dating app for finding a new roommate	H and M
	Use facebook to connect you to friends of friends	H (could be used in solution above) and L
Doesn't know which neighborhods or apartment amenitites to look for (never lived on his/her own before)	Scrape web and provide neighborhood scores for different categories using ML	M / H
	Enable users to comment on apartments after they have moved in to provide feedback on nieghborhoods, valuable ammentites, etc.	M M (execution risk is hard here, getting people to come back to add reviews after their done with the app could be difficult.
	Provide guides on neighorhoods, much like Lonely Planet for cities, for users to read (pure content)	M / L (just manual effort)
Difficult to visit an apartment while in university	Video tours in app	M H (getting all the content will be hard)
	VR experience (if the user has an oculus etc)	H H (getting the content will be hard)
	network of gig works who will go and visit the apartment for you and facetime you in	H H (assigning work to gig workers, getting network of them, billing, etc)

User Experience (Dating APP for finding a new roommate)

MVP: 1 roommate

- Onboarding wizard that asks for your preferences in a new roommate as well as for information about yourself. Also connect to facebook. Also needs city that user is moving to.

- Provide users with the option to only see friends of friends (if they want)

- Once onboarding complete, user can sees cards of people and can swipe left or right (similar to a dating app) if they think that person could be a good roommate. If there is a match, they are connected.

- Once the user has found a new aparment, we can ask (via email etc) them to mark themselves as no longer looking so that they are not matched with future "movers"

V2 could be enabling functionality for multiple roommate homes.

Success Metrics:

- # of DAUs

- Avg # of swipes until first match

- Avg number of matches before roommate is "found"

- Avg time spent on app per day

SPD_2017 · Answer 2 · 2022-09-06T22:24:47+0000

clarifying questions:

Who are we in this context? Google PM
Does the user know which city they want to move to? Yes
There are several concerns when moving to a new city such as finding a mover, finding a rental apartment, transporting a car, making new friends, and identifying a commute path to work, are we focusing on anything specific? - let's focus on the actual move and making it effortless.
Are there any constraints in terms of time, resources, or roadmap that I need to be aware of? No

Ok, so I will design a product for anyone who is planning to move from their current location to a new city. The goal is to make the move as effortless and efficient as possible using technology.

Let me take a few minutes to brainstorm and I will note down the user personas that are targeted users, their pain points, and product feature ideas to resolve those.

User personas:

someone moving for college
someone moving for a new job
someone moving for better healthcare
someone moving closer to family

Pain points:

Finding reliable packers and movers
Finding a rental apartment, roommates in the new city
Identifying commute options to work

Features:

User provides city, date of move and budget, app performs search for mover, rental property, location in the new city.
an app that offers recommendations based on user input and their past history for apartment rental, lifestyle choices and work commute.
App that will show public and other commute options from different part of the city to your work address example, you are moving to the Bay area, enter Mountain View, CA as your work address, the app shows nearby options for residential/rental apartments, commute to and from these locations to your work location
App let's user list their furniture, cars etc. for local sale and offer opportunity to buy similar stuff in the new city