How would you improve Dropbox?

While Dropbox started as a cloud storage solution, it has since evolved into a collaborative workspace solutions provider. It offers features that businesses use to help their teams to collaborate on projects online - in real time.

It also integrates with several other applications to create a rich ecosystem of different collaboration, information and asset management tools - all in one place.

It offers both mobile and web access to its platform for users

Clarifying Questions:

To better understand the improvements needed, clarity on the following clarifying questions will help

Q1. What is the business impact aimed through improvement?

Ans: Business wants to improve customer engagement for the online collaboration product launched recently

Q2: Dropbox is used both for personal and business use? Is there a customer group that Dropbox to target with this improvement?

Ans: We are focused on the engagement of customers in Business Plans

Q3: Is the improvement targeted for a particular platform - web or desktop

Ans: No. The improvement focus is not platform specific

User Groups

Thanks for the clarifying that we want to improve Dropbox collaboration tool experience for business customers.

The dimensions to segment business users are

a. Different teams (product, design, legal, development and so on) within the same organization

b. Users across Hierarchy (different seniority levels with different scope of responsibility and likely overseeing varying numbers of projects)

c. Users (freelancers, contractors, vendors) outside organization boundaries

I would like to focus on the users at Senior/Leadership positions within the team. This is because they help drive decisions within the team through prioritization calls, resolving dependencies, and at time resolving debates and conflicts. However, they need to do so for often large projects with several moving parts and may also be overseeing several projects in flight.

They are an important user group because they need to use their limited time in getting the right amount of visibility so they can focus their attentions where it is needed most.

Identifying Customer Paint Points/ Needs /Use Case

With several projects and teams under them, senior members face the following challenges

a. Difficulty in tracking so many moving parts across different projects.

b. Concern of important updates getting lost in the noise of transactional day-to-day updates

c. Lack of ability to get a 10,000 ft view of the projects they own and see which area needs their attention the most.

d. Being sensitive about the work life balance of team working across different geographical locations in different time zones

e. Concern about ensuring right document and access management of different users within and across organization

As a PM, I would prioritize solutions that help leadership inputs where they are required the most to their approvals/inputs are not bottleneck to project progress.

List of Solutions

The solutions that I recommend is to create a dashboard that summarizes the meaningful and essential information across all projects for a team member. While this dashboard is available to all, it delivers most value for team members who may be contributing or visualizing several projects concurrently (like design team, legal, and Group PMs etc.)

1. View of all projects that are behind their schedule (against plan) with ability to navigate to projects dashboards for more granular details.

2. View of all tasks that behind their deadlines along with owners for their tasks

3 Ability to add comments questions, assign tasks - at an individual (message directly and only to one or more team members) and project level (visible to all members added to the project) from their dashboard

4. Granular control on the type of updates delivered to the dashboard from projects (from turn off all updates to listening to updates at a specific milestone/task level)

5. Quick View of upcoming (say 14 business days) launches and deliverables.

6. Ability to export dashboards to a ppt, doc, PDF or a separate drobox paper - to run team meetings, weekly, monthly reviews etc.

7. Ability to schedule messages to team members so that they arrive to them at s specific time. This is useful to allow junior team members in different time zones to stay plugged off work during off-business hours and not feel the anxiety to respond as soon as they receive a question from a senior.

Prioritization

A metric for prioritization the effort is the time saved by a team member in taking a snapshot of all project’s status, all tasks due and important dates (reviews, launches etc.) vs the estimated effort required to build them

That metric is most improved by prioritizing the following from the listed solution above

1. Quick Dashboard View of upcoming (say 14 business days) launches and deliverables.

2. Ability to add comments questions, assign tasks - at an individual (message directly and only to one or more team members) and project level (visible to all members added to the project) from their dashboard

3. Ability to export dashboards (with customizable project details - late, upcoming, biggest account etc.) to a ppt, doc, PDF or a separate dropbox paper - to run team meetings, weekly, monthly reviews etc.

Cost of Development: Dropbox collaboration tools allow team to set various project parameters. The implementation of the solutions above entails adding various paraments that can be assigned to a project milestones and tasks and then create configurable rules to filter these parameters to create individual dashboards - and is feasible and is not cost prohibitive.

Performance Metrics

While the intent of project dashboards is to remove noise, increase focus, and save time for the team, these metrics are hard to measure qualitatively.

Therefore, we will use feature usage metrics like:

a. Daily active users of dashboards

b. Average number of actions taken on the dashboard

Summary

Online collaboration tools allow free flowing communication between team members. This communication, while desirable, often leads to unmanageable "update feeds”. This often obscures important information underneath all the noise.

The improvement recommendation that I make focuses on reducing the noise of all transactional day-to-day updates - from multiple team members working on the project - and create view of most relevant information that individuals can consume and respond to efficiently.

pmgal · Answer 2 · 2019-08-07T05:10:16+0000

Let me tell you my understanding of DropBox. It is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file sync . Is my understanding correct?

Yes

What are we trying to improve? Is it revenue, user engagement, user acquisition?

We are trying to improve user engagement.

Why are we trying to improve user engagement? Is there a drop in a KPI recently that caused the drop in user engagement?

Yes. There is a new competitor come in that some of our users for directed to.

Is there any particular market or area that I should focus on?

No.

Ok give me a few moments to gather my thoughts.

When I think of dropbox, I can classify my customers into two broad segments:

Personal User
- Young graduates looking for jobs – Storing copies of resume
- People using Dropbox primarily to store and share photos and videos
- Frequent traveler who likes to keep her files synchronized and available everywhere
Business User

I would like to focus on the customer segment who use DropBox to store and share photos and videos. I will name the persona Jane, a young professional who loves to travel and take pictures, and regularly shares them with friends and family.

As a young professional who loves to travel and take pictures:

I want to be able to have a move engaging experience when sharing my pictures with my family.
I want to be able to smartly classify my pictures and highlight the best ones

Let me create a prioritization matrix to decide the use case I should develop:

User Story	Customer Impact	Ease of Implementation	Overall Priority
More engaging sharing experience	M	H	2
Smart classification of pictures	H	H	1

Based on the prioritizing matrix, I would like to dig deeper into the second user story: Smart classification of pictures.

Here are some solutions that come to mind:

Classify and auto-create directories based on dates and locations
Facial recognition to be able to classify images based on person
Sort images with best ones on top (based on quality and smart tech)
Automatically recommend the best images to share with friends/family

1 is a very intuitive approach to achieve the goal and would have high user impact. It is also fairly easy to implement.

2 will also have a high user impact. Ease of implementation will depend on the level of image recognition technology available to DropBox.

3 This would improve customer satisfaction by adding value to the photos viewing experience

4 This can be added on to feature 3

I would recommend implementing features 1 and 3. DropBox will be able to automatically create directories based on the date of travel and location information in the pictures. It will also organize images such that the best ones are on top, hence providing a better photo viewing experience. Furthermore, this would make it very easy for the user to select images to share with friends/family, since usually there are too many and very repetitive photos.

In order to test the success of the feature, I would like to go through the user journey of the user:

Activity:

How many users have uploaded pictures to their dropbox?

How many users shared the DropBox recommended photos with their friends/family?

Retention:

How many times a user uploaded/looked at/shared photos on dropbox with single, 7-day, 30-day windows?

Monetization:

How many users converted to the paid storage plan?

How many users who used this feature converted to the paid storage plan?

Increase in revenue since feature release?

syadav2 · Answer 3 · 2019-07-04T02:12:12+0000

Clarifying Questions?

What do you mean by improvement? is there any particular aspect of the business?
Suppose the answer is that they want to improve customer retention?
Is customer retention for both business and individual users ? or any specific market segment
Let's assume they want to focus on the business segment.

Approach:

Well, if the goal is to increase customer retention rate we got to improve the value proposition to the customers. For the same, I will explore who are the users of Dropbox while exploring their motivations and goals for using it. After that, I will get into the user journey and along the way, I will see what are the pain points in the current product. Then, I will think of the solutions which could address the problems and finally, I will prioritize the solutions weighing between business value and efforts involved.

Dropbox is a SAS based content management software for small and large businesses to give frictionless file-sharing services. One could access his data anywhere anytime in the world.

Users:

Primarily I will divide dropbox users into two groups SMB and corporates. Since corporates segment is already crowded with Microsoft and other big players I would focus on SMB's customer base.

Use Goals:

Hassle free sign up process, SMB has a shorter sales cycle can expect to wait for having an up and running software.
Instant sync of the changes, while multiple users working on the same file or a folder. It should have an instant reflection of changes.
Easy process of merging of multiple folders into a single one. Sometimes different team members are working on their private files and at the end, they want to merge into a master file.

Pain Points:

Sign up and onboarding training is time taking process. First-Time users usually go to youtube videos to see "how to use a Dropbox"
There is always a latency during sync and that causes a serious interruption in team works.
When a group of members wants to make a single version of a work, this whole process is really time taking and hassle-prone.

Solutions:

There should be a single step signup process without asking tons of questions about the company. That could be faciliate having a virtual assistant who would facilitate through the process and make the software up and running. That's how it will become easy to use for novice users, this addresses a first pain point.
Latency problem attributes to available bandwidth. Bandwidth divides among all open apps in your device. If we would block other apps temporarily this problem could be easily solved.
Machine learning algorithm which captures all duplicate data and makes a single copy not losing any version of data. This would be game for designers who works in a multiple version scenario and they have to merge it manually

Recommendation:

As solution thirds would have a high impact and medium efforts. I recommend solution 3 to increase the customer retention rate and enhance the value proposition.