Create a solution that improves the communication between PMs and their customers.

Clarifying questions:

Q: Is there any specific product that the PM overlooks or is the PM responsible for building a common solution for a suite of products? 

A: Let's say the PM is part of the Google Maps team.

Q: As you talked about improvement in communications between PMs and customers, is it fair to assume that communication here means any mode or medium that helps PMs to seek user feedback, report on issues or new ideas that users might have in mind?

A: Yes

Q: What do we know about the existing modes of communication?

A: Currently, the product team relies on the Help & Feedback section of Google Maps through which users can send Product feedback.

Q: As part of the improvement do you want me to improve on the existing feature or build a new one to address the same problem?

A: You can decide.

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Structure: I will follow the following structure to answer this question 

1. Start by talking about who are our target users.

2. Followed by brainstorming on their pain points and focus on the most pressing ones.

3. I will go on to propose some solutions to solve those problems.

4. And will conclude by listing down the success metrics of my solutions.

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Users:

As is clear from the question itself, the primary users of this communication channel will be PMs and Google Map users. 

The first cohort i.e. PMs can be further segmented according to specific Google Map feature. This segmentation will help me uncover pain points specific to the feature team. This is important because, as the current version of Help & Feedback does not distinguish between features, we might potentially be missing out on improvement areas because the current solution is generic.

PMs can have sub-cohorts as per the features they look into as follows:

1. "Navigate" feature PM 
2."Explore" feature PM
3. "Save" feature PM etc.

Of these cohorts, in the interest of time, I would like to solve for the "Navigate" feature and "Saved" feature PM as they serve 2 of the most core use cases of maps and must be boasting the highest engagement across users.

Users can have sub-cohorts as per the frequency of their usage of Google Maps as follows:
1. Power user - uses maps every day more than once a day
2. Active user - uses maps 3-4 times a week
3. Passive user - uses maps once a week 

On the user side, I will be focusing on the Power users as is true for any product, the power users are the ones who are the strongest advocates of the products and would be willing to report issues/ propose ideas, etc.

So, to improve communication, I will focus on understanding the pain points of Navigate and Save feature PMs and Power users of Google Maps.

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Use cases/Painpoints:

Navigate/ Save feature PMs:
1. I want to nudge users towards providing me feedback in case of a good/bad experience while navigating.
2. I want users to report any errors/missing information in the map.
3. I want users to suggest improvements in navigate/save feature.
Power users:
4. I want to report issues/errors/missing information in Google Maps.
5. I want to share some very cool ideas to improve maps with the Google Maps team.

As the use cases 2&4 and 3&5 converge, essentially list boils down to 3 use cases. Of these 3 I would like to solve for #3 because it is not only a good way to constantly have a pulse on the evolving user needs but also to make the users feel heard and thereby build trust with them. I will not move forward with #1 and #2 as I believe the current solutions are well-placed to capture information inconsistency suggestions from users. 

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Solutions:

1. Create a yearly/monthly snapshot of users to make them feel valued and nudge them to provide suggestions.

2. Suggestion boxes can be nudged more intelligently based on milestones achieved by users or while facing specific problems.

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Prioritization:

  I would like to evaluate the solutions based on reach, impact to users and build effort/complexity:

Solution #1 will have a moderate reach as it can be targeted to both Power and active users due to their meaningful level of activities on map. However, there is a possibility of users still not providing feedback through these snapshots or providing biased suggestions due to recency bias. In terms of building this feature, it's going to be fairly complex.

Solution #2 in comparison has a higher reach as it can be targeted to almost all users. The feature will have a high impact as well as it will encourage users to provide feedback when the incident is fresh in their minds and thereby the quality of data will be better and actionable. Building it would primarily involve identifying the trigger points and as well as possible reasons for each incident and then could be gradually scaled up to all other features in Google Maps thereby indexing moderately on the build side.

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Success metrics:

Based on the prioritization exercise, I would like to go ahead with solution#2 and will propose the following metrics to gauge its success:

1. % (# completed suggestion exercises / # total suggestion nudges)

2. Adoption - % (# unique users submitting suggestion at least once / # unique users shown suggestion box at least once) - this will be the primary success metric and will indicate the extent to which user base found the feature useful.

3. Avg. completion rate of suggestions cut across different suggestion nudges - this will help me understand the suggestion flows that are working well vs the ones which are not and thereby optimize or improve or deprecate suggestion flows.