Pretend you're a Product Manager at Google Maps. Your objective is to increase customer engagement with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). What do you do? Next, how would you get SMBs to implement your solution?

1. Product description : Google maps helps folks to find a location and how to get to that location. In the case of SMbs , it is critical for customers to know where these SMBs are located and how do people get to that location the SMBs are generally very dependent on being identified to a location as that is there major visbility aspect.

2. Clarification quesitons :

- Do we need to consider all SMBs (global) or can I consider just US? - Can consider just US,

- within US should I consider all small, medium towns and major cities or can i consider just a major cities - You can consider just major citiies

- Follow up quesitons - All major cities or one city? you can decide

3. Picking a goal:

Currently SMB's are primraily served by proximity based searches "nearby" option that has siginificant usage in Google maps. A good goal for increasing customer engagement for SMB would be increasing a conversational context when the customer is looking up the SMB as part of exploring the business during the "nearby" feature usage

4. user groups

A - Other SMBs

B- Enterprises / Corporations that could use the SMbs as vendor/ support

C- retail consumers

Do you have a choice, my preference would be retail consumers as that would increase the foot traffic/ engagement. --- Yes e could go ahead with retail consumers.

5. use cases/ painpoints

i) personalized insight on the SMB: based on the primary search not just showing the business but showing offers or new items or the search related stuff that is based on personal preferences:::: High impact for consumer, High Impact for SMB

ii) SMB notification to connect: the SMB getting notification on the search that could allow insight on consumer and being able to reach out to proactively:::: Low impact for consumer, High impact for SMB

iii) colloboration / refferal : consumers able to share info about the SMB and getting refeeral points allowing increased engagement with SMBs:::: Medium/low impact for consumer and SMB

6) Potential solutions

i) Google maps captures high level information through categories and sub categories. The solution for this would mean 1) auto parsing the public domain offers / information and making it known to consumer and 2) allowing a colloboration platform for SMB that they update on regular basis on offers, wait time...

ii) based on search trigger a notfiication system that informs the SMB about potential engagement. But then the solution to be effective would need SMB also reaching out consumer and that would require realtime consent mechanisim with short and long live token system

iii) This would be a light weight solution that be share from the  nearby list with ability to add comments and extending the system to a point system. the solution could be further extended to SMb specific point system that could also be offered as a service to SMBs

7) Prioritization

8. From the table it is clear that Personalization would have the highest impact for consumers and SMB and could generate additional customer engagement with SMB's though the solution cost is high the system ROI could be high for SMB influencing the solution to be a paid solution that Google could also earn revenue

9.Metrics

Frequency - How frequent the personalization feature is used /clicked by consumer

Conversion - How many of the cosumers that used the feature resulted in net new business for the SMB

Monetization -
1) for SMB - How did net new business convert in revenue

2) for Goolge - How many SMBs started using the feature and generate new ad revenue for Google