As the Product Manager at a new startup aiming to assist people in finding gifts for their friends and family, what features or functionalities would you prioritize in building the platform?

• Is this platform just assisting people in finding gifts or also procuring and selling those gifts? à Let’s concentrate on the assisting part
• Is there any user studies done before building this startup idea that I should be aware of? à Just from general everyday experience
• Are there any budgetary or time-constraints I should be aware of? à None
• The gifts can be for any occasion and no constraint on the monetary value of the gifts? à Yes
• Are we considering to assist people of any specific region or globally? (gifts vary a lot from 1 culture to another and different countries celebrate different occasion with varying fervour) à You can choose

I am considering region of India for designing this platform.

In a 365 days calendar, there are the obvious religious festivities of Diwali, Dusshera, Holi, Christmas, and many others. On an average, an Indian person must attend like 5-10 birthday parties of friends and 2-3 weddings in a year. Some even must attend 1 or 2 house-warming parties, baby showers etc. Then there are the Mothers’ day, father’s day, parents/siblings birthdays, wedding anniversaries celebrations etc. Each one of those occasions involve exchange of gifts. So, the goal of the startup could be – Making your gift exploration journey for any occasion as relaxing and enjoyable as possible!

Now I will structure my answer by looking at few of the potential user segments and target one of those. Then discuss the target user segments’ pain points and prioritize those. Next, I will brainstorm a few solutions and ultimately prioritize them to come up with the most essential features of the platform.

User segments:

1. Kids with limited pocket money or the college going students – want to gift their parents something useful as well to their friends
2. Young adults who have just entered the workforce with smaller disposable income – want to gift their parents, friends/younger cousins/siblings expect gifts as they have started earning
3. More experienced working professionals 40-60 years of age – don’t have much time to search for gifts offline/online in their busy day-to-day lives
4. Senior citizens/older folks – have a lot of time but don’t want to go out searching for gifts and tend to attend more parties and celebrations but somewhat averse to technology

The 1st 2 user segments have ample time to search on website and scroll through social media pages to come up with gifting ideas. Also, might not be willing to shell out any money to receive gifting ideas.

Since senior citizens are averse to technology, acquiring and activating them will be a huge challenge at the intial stages of teh product.

Let’s target the more experienced working professionals with high disposable income who want quick quality suggestions for gifting.

Pain points:

1. Unable to decide what’s an appropriate gift for a specific occasion for a particular friend/family
2. Unable to remember the items earlier gifted or received
3. Unable to understand which gifts are of the same monetary value as the ones they had received
4. Unaware of the ongoing gifting trends for various occasions
5. Want the gift to be unique so that the receiver is happy
6. Not aware of where he/she can purchase the gift and how long before should he/she purchase the gift to be able to get it on time

Addressing the what gift, why particular gift, how and when to purchase are the important questions which should be answered by the gifting assistant platform so that its vision of making the gifting journey as relaxing as possible can be achieved. I feel the 1st pain point addresses the “what”, the next 3 pain points addresses the “why” and the last pain point addresses the “when and how” in the decreasing order of priority. The “why the gift” can really be a USP of this gift exploration platform.

Important features/functionalities and brainstorm a few solutions to implement them:

1. User signup
2. Establish the occasion and the donor/receiver profile
3. Search for appropriate gifts
4. List a few recommended gifts
5. Show details for each of the gifts

User signup – a) Using a valid email id/phone number or b) Integration with any of the social media apps such as Meta and signup using Facebook or Instagram’s email id

There should be a 1-2 liner description with why should users trust them to come up with authentic, useful and unique gifting ideas

Establish the occasion and the donor/receiver profile – a) During the sign up step itself, ask the user some questions to establish his/her profile b) Now, when the user logs into the platform to search for a gift ask questions about the user (donor) and receiver to establish their profiles, ask for the occasion and is there any gifting idea/product that they have in their mind or they don’t want to gift some specific items c) Using the donor and receiver’s social media profiles, what they have been searching for the past few months or which accounts/people they have been following, with what type of content they had been engaging, their respective user profiles can be searched

Search for appropriate gifts – a) Have a curated list of gifts to be suggested for various occasions depending on receiver and donor profiles (can be partially created with the help of the publicly available virtual assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity) b) Modify the above list with –

• the data from point (c) of the above step
• any ongoing trends in the social media platforms
• maintaining history of gifts given and received by a user (by explicitly asking the users to feed the data whenever they give/receive gifts or by following their social media accounts and sending them notifications on special occasions or by analyzing the pictures in their social media accounts and sending them notifications for confirmations before auto-filling)

List a few recommended gifts – List 10 gift ideas with pictures, approximate price, when to purchase, user review rating and a starting 1-2 liner of the “why”

Show details for each of the gifts – Clicking on any of the gift ideas should open up the page with the picture, the price, a detailed “Why” section”, when to buy, where to buy (an offline retail shop with address and direction or an online website to place the order), a detailed user review section

In each of the last 3 stages, a user should always be able to input any gifting idea/reservations that they have in mind or some qualifications to modify the search.

After the user closes the session or about to close the session, ask the user to review the gifting ideas for which the user clicked and checked the gifting idea in detail.