You are the PM for Pixel phones. How will you improve Pixel to make it the best-selling phone?

Question

You are the PM for Pixel phones. How will you improve Pixel to make it the best-selling phone?

Asked at Google in the past year

501 views

Product Improvement category

Asked at

501 views

How to answer Product Improvement questions

Interview Guide

Top Google interview questions

What is your favorite product? Why?89 answers | 263k views
How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?62 answers | 82.5k views
Build a product to buy and sell antiques.54 answers | 66.8k views
See Google PM Interview Questions

Top Product Improvement interview questions

How would you improve Google Maps?53 answers | 228k views
How would you improve YouTube?29 answers | 81.3k views
How can you improve Facebook Stories?22 answers | 45.5k views
See Product Improvement PM Interview Questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

Ujjwald · Answer 1 · 2024-06-02T06:22:24+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

Pixel is a smart phone from Google. It runs stock Android, and is a part of the hardware line up from Google, which also includes the Pixel tablet and the Pixel watch.

This is part of Google's larger ecosystem, which consists of, among other things, YouTube, Gmail, G-Drive, Photos, etc.

One other point on Pixel is that they design a lot of the components, including the Tensor Chip, and the phone in conjunction with manufacturers.

Step 2 - Scope the product

When you say improvement to make it the best selling phone, are we talking of market share or something else?

Interviewer - Market share

Is there a specific market we are talking about?

Interviewer - Nothing specific. You can choose.

Because we are talking of hardware here, we also need to look at things like distribution channels, marketing strategy, what kind of audience we are targeting, what are the channels used for marketing.

Additionally, we need to think about hardware vs software. For the purposes of this interview, I want to talk more about the differentiators we may add in terms of software, which would make life convenient for the users.

Step 3 - Users

If we look at smartphone users in general, we have the iPhone users and the Android users. I would focus on Android users here, because iPhone users often get hooked to that ecosystem which includes the phone, iPad, Watch and Macbooks. So getting them to switch will be an arduous task.

Even Android markets like India are quite fragmented, with players such as Samsung, and some Chinese players like Vivo, Xiaomi, etc. These are the kinds of markets we can target. Basically, we can aim to be a premium Android offering. This will not only increase our market share but also have healthy margins.

If we look at even the users in India and such emerging markets, the users can be divided into children, working age population and elderly. Because we want to increase market share, I will focus on the working age population, because of the sheer number here. Even if we take India, a country of 1.4 billion, we have around 300 million in the working age population, and of these probably 50 million with decent disposable incomes.

When we look at working age populations, these are working couples who really want to be most productive with their time and who really care about convenience

Step 4 - Journey and Pain Points

If we really divide their journey into 2 components, it would include things they need to do at home and thing they need to do at work.

Place	Pain Point	Severity of Pain Point
Home - tasks	Need to go out and get some stuff like groceries or run some errands. Need to check what to get and I lose 15 mins in just making that list	L (A lot of time is lost in deciding what vegetables I actually need to buy)
	Need to quickly make a dish because I have to run for work	S (Usually making a sandwich and people stick to tried and tested things here)
	Keeping the house clean is a chore because office - work is very tiring	M (In low to middle income countries where Android dominates access to maids or other cleaning services is not very far off)
Home - family time	Don't know which movie to watch and where	S (There are other apps that you can check if you want to see which movie you want to watch. Not sure Pixel is best suited to solve this problem)
	Cook a nice dish together with family	L (This could be a problem worth solving because it improves family time)
	Where can I go for a nice evening with family	M (We could do this but there are other apps that you could use to solve this better)
	Where do I go for a vacation, and what are the logistics of it	L (This is something that we can do because we have maps data for pretty much every location in the world, and we can pull in information from Google Flights for hotel, flights etc.)
Work	When do I have my meetings? When I look at my calendar it is already too late	S (Calendar solves this problem)
	What are the reports i need to submit and by when	S(Tasks solves this problem)
	What is the best way to submit the research paper and can someone do a proof read before submitting	M (Proof reading is nice, but in this context would still label this as an M)

So, from the above I would look at the following pain points.

Need to go out and get some stuff like groceries or run some errands. Need to check what to get and I lose 15 mins in just making that list
Cook a nice dish together with family
Where do I go for a vacation, and what are the logistics of it

Step 5 - Solutions and Prioritizations

Pain Point	Solution	Impact	Engineering Effort
Need to go out and get some stuff like groceries or run some errands. Need to check what to get and I lose 15 mins in just making that list	Have a list that you can just push to order via the app of. your choice. You would keep adding to this list regularly	M (This would still involve you adding things always, which is already available)	S (Most of the basic structure already available)
	Take a photo of a fully stocked refrigerator and the empty refrigerator and automatically populate the list, and maybe even place an order via Google Pay.	M (This could solve the end to end use case for Grocery delivery but may still lead to people forgetting what to add)	M (Image recognition is already there. We may need to create a workflow management tool like Zapier which can link to a delivery app of your choice. Google invests in a lot of startups, so an appropriate company could be tapped to integrate for order placement and delivery)
	Recommend things to be added based on what others have added to their own shopping list. In Google Keep or Google Home, have a separate section called groceries, where based on location, you can add certain things because we know that geographically people closer by order similar things. This and the above could involve integrations with Matter.	L (This could help especially when we forget adding some things. The user will anyway have to confirm the list before order placement)	M (Models already should exist for this and it is basically an integration play after that. Image recognition is already there. We may need to create a workflow management tool like Zapier which can link to a delivery app of your choice. Google invests in a lot of startups, so an appropriate company could be tapped to integrate for order placement and delivery)
Cook a nice dish together with family	Recommend good dishes based on Google searches done	S (This is how current behaviour works anyway)	S (already exists and this is basic Google search)
	From a photo of the ingredients available in the refrigerator, list the best selling recipes that can be cooked. Have quick service apps deliver any ingredients that are not available on the app.	L (YouTube could be leveraged for this and the appropriate video could be shown based on the ingredients available)	S (Should not be very tough because Google has great image recognition algos already and then it is basically retrieving from YouTube dishes. If there is no description in YouTube then you may have to do an image search on the frames but given Google's Engineering prowess, this should not be very difficult)
Where do I go for a vacation, and what are the logistics of it	If I have a budget of $1000 and I want to go to SEA, based on fares and rating information from Google Maps, draw the best itinerary for me and present that to be	L (Acting as a good travel advisor which includes visa requirements, documents to be submitted for a visa, summary of Reddit threads for a given place, maps to draw the itinerary)	M (The structure is basically there, and we just need to put it all together)

So, based on the above prioritization, I would recommend the following solutions. Please note that these will be on Android and will only be available on the Pixel phones

Google Groceries - Using the Matter standard, we can connect to your smart refrigerator so that you can order groceries with just one click
Google Recipes - Recommend dishes from award winning chefs based on the ingredients available in your refrigerator
Smart Trip Planner - Leverage Google Maps and other apps to plan a trip based on the budget available to you. This would include reviews from Google and Reddit (given Gemini is now trained on Reddit) and summary of the important points such as visa requirements and things to submit when applying for a visa.

Step 6 - Risks

Some of the solutions above rely on the Matter protocol, and that is still maturing. It does assume that the standard will pick up in the next couple of years.

Step 7 - Metrics

The metrics I would like to check are :

% increase in Pixel sales
% of people who used the Groceries/Planner feature
Amount of time spent on these new features that have been launched
Reviews of these new features by influencers, etc.

Step 8 - Summary

We were looking at how to improve Pixel to be the best selling phone in emerging markets where Android dominates. We picked the working population because of their relatively higher disposable income and identified 3 key pain points.

Need to go out and get some stuff like groceries or run some errands. Need to check what to get and I lose 15 mins in just making that list
Cook a nice dish together with family
Where do I go for a vacation, and what are the logistics of it

From there, we identified 3 key features which we can add exclusively to Pixel phones. These are

Google Groceries - Using the Matter standard, we can connect to your smart refrigerator so that you can order groceries with just one click
Google Recipes - Recommend dishes from award winning chefs based on the ingredients available in your refrigerator
Smart Trip Planner - Leverage Google Maps and other apps to plan a trip based on the budget available to you. This would include reviews from Google and Reddit (given Gemini is now trained on Reddit) and summary of the important points such as visa requirements and things to submit when applying for a visa.

While there are risks with Matter adoption, we can look at the following metrics to see if we are on the right path.

% increase in Pixel sales
% of people who used the Groceries/Planner feature
Amount of time spent on these new features that have been launched
Reviews of these new features by influencers, etc.