You are responsible for building an education platform that connects people looking to learn new skills with experienced individuals who can teach them (such as pottery, welding, piano, math, etc.). Essentially, it's a shared economy for skills. How would you approach this task?

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You are responsible for building an education platform that connects people looking to learn new skills with experienced individuals who can teach them (such as pottery, welding, piano, math, etc.). Essentially, it's a shared economy for skills. How would you approach this task?

Asked at Google over a year ago

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tkbear · Answer 1 · 2024-05-17T15:07:56+0000

Questions
1. Is this a product to be built in Meta? No
2. Not academic education → skill based
3. Since education platform → assume digital element, not just matchmaking
Mission/goals
1. Education platform - advance human potential by helping them learn skills from each other
  1. engagement/people on platform → potentially ads or take a cut from lessons
2. People are curious and passionate about things → want to pursue greatness or interests by learning from others
Personas
1. Masters - looking to teach skills
  1. Teach beginners
    1. Focus here because larger market than professionals. Probably charge less but overall more.
  2. Fine tune professionals
2. Apprentices - looking to learn skills
  1. Learn as hobby/interest
    1. Most of the listed examples seem hobby oridented
  2. Learn as career
3. Marketplace so need solutions that address both.
Solutions - connect masters teaching beginner hobbyist. Focusing on connect masters/apprentices due to prompt - not really learning tools

Solutions	User value	Business value	Effort
Guilds - people join groups for their interest - can learn informally/from each other	5 More community building → more interested in connecting/learning with others. Learn from people with different skills. Share journey for joint learning/failures	5 Opportunity for edu platform to get different revenue sources. Membership fee, put events together, ads	3 Tech is easy but probably a bit harder to set up because need establish community → need people that are active
“Marketplace” - masters and apprentices posts and apply to each other	3 Directly connects masters/apprentices but less connection building? Hard to distinguish who are good even with reviews sometimes.	2 Posting fee and ads from masters.	3 Tech easy set up. But hard to establish marketplace. chicken/egg
Seminars - Masters create classes and apprentices can go to them. Digital and in person	4 Periodic learning vs guilds. Perhaps less connection. If digital → a lot of info already available online for free. In person a bit more community building	2 Posting fee and ads from masters. Event fee.	3 Tech easy set up. But hard to establish marketplace. chicken/egg
Master Bot - AI powered to get expert knowledge across many → personal teacher	4 High touch/specific to you but weak on connection with others	3 Charge premium for master of masters but probably don’t need for this demographic of hobby people.	2 Moonshot. Need set up good models and to be personal teacher. Won’t work for all hobby types

sahil kapoor · Answer 2 · 2024-04-14T21:14:13+0000

Clarifying question -

1. Where are we launching and building this product? United States

2. Are we building a mobile app or a web app? Web App

3. is there a specific goal in mind that we are trying to achieve? New customer Acquisition

4. Are we just building a marketplace that connects or do we offer services ourslefts? We just connect

Identify User

Buyers

Induilavials
Organization looking to upskill/ train( companies, school etc)

2. Seller

People providing services

User Needs

Buyer Needs

Buyers want to upskill and learn new skills
they want to find people online or nearby that can teach them the skills
they want to vet the person teaching them
They want a rough timeline and overview of the skills though
They want to seamlessly pay for this
They want a certificate of completion

Seller Needs

They want to find buyers to teach the unique skill set
They want to find buyers who can work with their timetable and are flexible.
They want the option to teach in groups and/or idnidiclas
They want a secure payment method.
They want buyers to review their teaching once completed

Prioritizing User needs

Buyer

Must Haves

1. they want to find people online or nearby that can teach them the skills

2. They want a rough timeline and overview of the skills though

3. They want to pay for this seamlessly

Should have

1. They want to vet the person teaching them

2. They want a rough timeline and overview of the skills though

Could have

1. They want a certificate of completion

Seller

Must Have

They want to find buyers to teach the unique skill set
They want to find buyers who can work with their timetable and are flexible.
They want a secure payment method.

Should have

They want the option to teach in groups and/or idnidiclas

Could have

They want buyers to review their teaching once completed

Solutions

Create a webpage where sellers can create their profiles and list the services they offer.
Filters - Enable buyers to search for the skills they are interested in and availability.
Implement integration with the Google Maps API to locate nearby people and use geolocation to match buyers with sellers.
Set up an easy payment system for transactions (with our commission deducted from the seller's earnings)

EvalutEvaluationion

Solution	Reach	Impact	Effort
Webpage	High	High	low
Filters	High	Medium	low
Google Integration	Medium	High	Medium
PaymnePayment		High	Low

I will build - 1,2,4 first based on the above analysis

beeflover · Answer 3 · 2024-04-12T21:13:55+0000

You are responsible for building an education platform that connects people looking to learn new skills with experienced individuals who can teach them (such as pottery, welding, piano, math, etc.). Essentially, it's a shared economy for skills. How would you approach this task?

Clarification:

Building this platform for Google

Google mission:

Sort and organize the world’s information in a way that’s helpful and accessible to all

Our Goal:

Building a edtech product that empowers people to learn new skills and offers a platform for subject matter experts to teach their expertise

connects to google’s mission in that it’s democratizing skill sets to be widely accessible to everyone

google currently lacks an educational product (although they do offer certification courses) so it fits into it’s ecosystem, can plug google certification courses in the platform to drive activation and monetization

Competitors:

Udemy

catering more to individual teachers and offers a more diverse course market

certifications hold less weight as they are typically not official programs

cheaper prices, pay per course monetization model

Coursera

less diverse course market

caters more to companies and universities, certification is more “legit” and holds more professional weight

pay per month model, can be more pricey

Users (2 main groups)

Learners

Teachers

Will focus on teachers, because the number & supply of teacher directly influences the # of learners that uses the platform, here we are using uber’s approach to prioritize drivers before onboarding users because the more drivers there are, the more users will actually use the service.

In the teacher user group, there are 4 personas:

Individuals who have a career but want to teach their expertise as a side hussle

Individuals who are looking to monetize their expertise as a Full-Time professional coach

Universities offering university certificates

Companies offering professional certificates

I will choose to focus on the 4th user group as I feel that the current market is quite saturated for both individual and university courses. I don’t see a lot of professional certificates from companies being offered and think there’s potential for a bigger impact there, especially in fields like Tech and marketing.

Use cases

Talent Recruiting/ brand awareness

As a company, I want to drive company brand awareness in the talent market

P3

Talent Recruiting

As a company, I want to easily hire talent that has the skillset needed for positions

P2

Revenue Generation

As a company, I want to generate revenue by utilizing talent/ expertise within the company

P1

Potential Features:

As a company, I want to generate revenue by utilizing talent/ expertise within the company

easily generate lesson plan with gen AI based on Tech stack/ specific skill sets that the team uses

monetization model can be by monthly subscription to access materials

H/M

As a company, I want to easily hire talent that has the skillset needed for positions

An analytics dashboard that allows company reps to see performance of top students enrolled in course by skill and contact them to fill open roles

M/M

As a company, I want to drive company brand awareness in the talent market

explore page can contain “currently trending” or “top courses in xxx subject” and get more views and traction and activation from users, as well as to establish leadership position in the field

L/L

Success metrics:

DAU, WAU, MAU

# of courses launched, # of students enrolled in course

# of students entered into the company talent pipeline