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Design a car music system for high-end luxury cars.

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Are we a music system company, Car company?Car company:  Experience of the user, revenue through.  Customers: 
  • High end customers where the car is a family car. : Suv 
  • Customer who like to drive their car but travel alone. : hatchbacks, top downs
  • Customers who are the sole users of the car but they hire a driver: Sedans.
 Customer who like to drive their car but travel alone: Larger number of people. They do not have any restrictions on how much they would want to spend.  Painpoints: 
  • Drive and would love to have a handsfree experience. 
  • Audio quality should be great. 
  • Intelligent enough to pick on what to play because while I am driving I dont wnat to be disturbed. Or choose the music.
  • Should not hinder while I am talking to people. 
  • It should have a seamless experience while working with other devices. 
  •  Based on who is asking for the song, it should be intelligent enough to suggest. 
   
Audio quality should be great. - Should be able to hear all harmonics of the musics, high low. Impact - H, Effort - M
Drive and would love to have a handsfree experience- Way to control through steering wheel.
 - Way to control via audio.  
Impact - H, Effort - M

Impact - H, Effort - M
Intelligent enough to pick on what to play because while I am driving I dont wnat to be disturbed. Or choose the music. - Based on the speed and location it can tell what can be played or what has been played.  - From your voice command it should be able to tell are you happy, low, angry and play music.
 - If two people are talking about what to play, can the music system be smart enough to suggest something. ‘May I suggest,’ ‘pick one’
Impact - H, Effort - M, However people people may not want same kind of exp. when they come to the highways, inside. Impact - H, Effort - H Impact - H, Effort - M, Privacy issue. 
Should not hinder while I am talking to people. It should be able to understand ambient noises. - window down and 2 ppl talking, volume needs to be reduced.
 - 2 ppl talking volume reduced.
 - Distress noise, stop all together. 
Impact - H, Effort - M
It should have a seamless experience while working with other devices.- Connect with phone as soon as they walk in.  - Catch which app is open and which music is playing and play it well.  - Even if it is video, just play the audioImpact - H, Effort - M, some companies are already doing this.
Based on who is asking for the song, it should be intelligent enough to suggest- Kids are asking, wife is asking, old dad is asking, play music, news based on that.
 - Can it become a karioyke machine? 
Impact - H, Effort - H


Impact - H, Effort - M, Safety issues.
   
 I will do all the High impact, Medium effort that do not have any secondary concerns
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Clarify

Interesting, are we thinking about standalone product (or) will be work with auto manufacturers to integrate our product? Let us assume we want to build standalone product

 

Are there any specific users we want to cater to? it is upto you

 

Will this be hardware product or software product? Let us assume that we will start with software product which can be bundled with hardware if successful.

 

Ok - we would like to build the car music system for high end luxury cars. Since the people in the user segment have luxury car, they likely will be able to afford costly systems. I will try to come up with users, attempt to clearly specify product differentiation and conclude with what we should build.

Users & customers

  • Luxury car buyers (user)
  • Rental companies (customer)
  • Car companies (customer)

The buyers probably buy luxury cars for drive, comfort, status and because they can afford. The price is not going to be much of factor here.

We can also market the standalone music player to the rental companies. However, the adoption might be low because most of the customers are budget conscious.

We can potentially form partnership with car companies to provide the music system as upgrade option.

Initially we will focus on the luxury car buyers. This market is very small, but our profit margins will be higher. They also might be the market best suited for adoption of the product.

User needs

* Impact depicts the user need or wow factor. Effort is the effort required by technology team to deliver the solution.

 

  1. User should be able to find (touch-screen or voice) and play music (impact: H, effort: H)
  2. User should be able to browse music using genre, album, artist, year, playlist.  (impact: H, effort: H)
  3. User should be able to control the volume  (impact: H, effort: L)
  4. User should be able to connect various premium streaming services like Spotify, Google music, Apple music. (impact: H, effort: M, potential to monetize)
  5. User should be able to connect various free streaming services like Pandora, TuneIn, YouTube, Slacker radio. (impact: H, effort: M)
  6. User should be able to see the lyrics (impact: L, effort: M)
  7. User should be able to set the equalizer (impact: H, effort: L)
  8. User should be able to tune-in to FM Radio (impact: M, effort: L)
  9. User should be able to store local music (impact: S, effort: M)
  10. User should be able to create tunes (impact: S, effort: L)
  11. User should be able to put the songs in karaoke mode (impact: S, effort: L)
  12. User should be able to connect to existing speaker system (impact: H, effort: L)
  13. User should be able to define customized user profile - so that the last played music can be customized (impact: M, effort: M)
  14. User should be able to see various mixes generated based on history (impact: H, effort: M)
  15. User should be able to save playlist, song, album, artist, radio station as favorite (impact: M, effort: M)
  16. User should be able to update the software in the car music system (impact: H, effort: L)

Comparison with current music systems

Lot of current products allow the users to 1-5,7,8,12,15.

However, since we are serving niche market - we can offer better product.

These are product goals we should strive for

  • Find music easily across services, connect to the services seamlessly (Rich UI experience)
  • Generate mixes based on past listening history
  • Allow maintenance of user profiles
  • Partner with various cell providers to provide connectivity (Can be monetized)
  • Provide subscription for premium streaming services (Can be monetized)
  • Provide software updates so that new features can be pushed.
  • Provide hardware that will power the music system
  • Partner with speaker companies and add upgraded speakers

What do we priortize

For the initial MVP - we will prioritize the minimum set of features 1,2,3,12,15 so that the music system can compete in the market.

Along with this we need to focus on 4,5 so that we can have some source of music.
However, we will identify the music streaming services and only integrate with them. I will probably pick Spotify because of the large user base, content. Furthermore, it might be good ideal to also integrate with couple of free service providers like Slacker, Pandora etc.

16 will be prioritized so that we can push the software updates to the music system. This will help us retain the customers. Most of the car systems today so not have software updates

 

What do we measure

We can measure success by looking at the following metrics:

  • Number of users who download the app
  • Daily user activity / monthly user activity
  • Bounce rate - users who stopped using the app
  • Top most used streaming app

Conclusion 

The products in the market made by car manufacturers are outdated. Biggest challenge would be to find out if there is real market for software product (why would the user download our car music system app when streaming providers are providing very rich streaming experiences?).

I would recommend that we develop hardware and bundle our software. The hardware should be modular and be easily plugged into the car. This could be very small screen that fits on top on existing cars consoles and use Bluetooth to connect to the speakers.

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Things you did well 

  • Clarifying Questions: You asked a good set of clarifying questions to narrow down the scope of the question 
  • Structure: Great structure of the answer. It's easy to follow and see that you are familiar with answering product design questions 
  • Pain points: You listed a good number of user needs

Areas of Improvement 

  • Add-on to cars: If you're suggesting that people should buy an extra item to take advantage of this new music system, it will be great to describe how it will work with the car's current system. Is it relpacing the current system? Or is it an add on? Where would the hardware sit? Or is it just sofware? If it is sofware, how would it integrate with the current system? I would have suggested a car music system app so that I can make it easy to work with the car's current sofware and hardware. 
  • Out of the box thinking: It's good to list out a couple solutions that speak to your thinking out of the box abilities, even if you disregard them later in the evaluation phase. Consider listing a couple solutions that showcase your creativity
  • App: You mentioned in the metrics section that you'll be mesasuring number of app downloads. It wasn't mentioned until then that your solution is an app. I think it's important for you to clarify this earlier 
I hope it helps. 
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