Design a product for event gathering for Google.

Thank you for the question. Before I get into the details, I want to get some clarifications done. Then based on how this goes, I might make some assumptions (which will be listed) and then I will lay out a structure that I will work through.

Lets get into clarifications -

1/ When we say even gathering what do you mean by that? - People meeting up for an event.

2/ When we say product, do you have anything specific in mind like a mobile app or something? Ya mobile app.

3/ Region? US

4/ Any specific event types? No

5/[if any more clarifications, I will add them here]

What is the goal of our product? Do we want more engagement? - Yes

Ok, thank you. Here is my structure - 

1/ Potential User segments

2/ Select 1 segment

3/ Define their journey

4/ Identity pain points along the journey

5/ Propose solutions for those pain points

6/ Prioritize the solutions that defines the roadmap

7/ Identify success metrics

8/ Time allowing - define user experience

9/ Time allowing - Launch plan

1/Potential user segments

a/ Profession event organizers

b/ Ad hoc event organizers

c/ attendees to professional events

d/ attendees to adhoc events

e/ sponsors

2/ 1 segment

c/ attendees to adhoc events - these are events that individuals/grps want to attend to and are not professional events, but more adhoc based on their interests. Such as event for a book club, or for a kids biking event in the downtown and so on. Reason to select this group is because there are already apps available for professional events to organize and attend. For the enthusiasts who want to praticiapte in more adhoc events and interest based events, it is difficult to find a good solution. If u recall there used to be “meet” but that has now fizzled. Also my hypothesis is that this grp is large in nature and would align with our engagement goal.

3/ Journey

a/ Start with an interest -> b/ search for physical events in the area they are interested in or virtual events in the date range, c/ get details on the events, d/ track legitimacy of the events (security), e/see who else is interested in or going to or attending virtually, f/ purchase tickets if required, g/ plan the commute, h/ attend, i/ leave feedback, j/ identify after event activities, k/ repeat attending if aligns with interests

4/ Identify painpoints in the parts of the journey

a/ Start with an interest -> b/ search for physical events in the area they are interested in or virtual events in the date range, c/ get details on the events, d/ track legitimacy of the events (security), e/see who else is interested in or going to or attending virtually, f/ purchase tickets if required, g/ plan the commute, h/ attend, i/ leave feedback, j/ identify after event activities, k/ repeat attending if aligns with interests

I want to focus on a/ searching for events of my interest and b/ identifying the legitimacy of the event. These are more important that the rest because these will enable us to solution a good product that caters to a wide variety of interests and is trustworthy.

5/ Propose solutions for those painpoints

a/ searching for events of my interest

Painpoint 1: Getting a good list of events

Solution 1: creating a portal for adhoc event organizers to add their event with details

Solution 2: scraping through the internet to get events and making them a proper event catalog in the product

Painpoint 2: Associating events with right interests

Solution 1: getting a “interest” attribute from the author of the event

Solution 2: using ML models to suggest “interest” attributes to the event

Painpoint 3: Keeping the event status updated

Solution 1: Giving a easy experience for the author to update status

Solution 2: Track updates for events that have been captured via internet crawling

b/ identifying the legitimacy of the event

Solution 1: Getting reviews from the visitors and flagging current events and future events from these authors

Solution 2: Show who is visiting the event if they are from the reviewers google contacts

Solution 3: emeet with organizers and other attendees to clear any questions

Solution 4: Cash is debited only after the event is over

6/ Prioritize

7/ Success metrics

Goal - engagement

a/ # of events added per week

b/ # of events marked are “fish” per week

c/ # of events searched per day

d/ # of events marked are interested/attending per day

e/ # of unique users per day/week/month

f/ # of repeat users per week/month

• Are we considering the context of the global pandemic, or shall I assume it's in a post-covid world? 
  • (current context)  Perhaps lean towards virtual events or outdoor events, whereas a lot of indoor events could be cancelled or adjusted
• When we talk about event gathering - for the sake of time - Are we discussing event discovery and planning, or in-event experiene and logistics? (in-event?)
• Any other important factors of contexts I should be aware of? (open-ended)

• Company mission: organize the worlds' info and make it universally accessible and useful

• When we speak of events, people come to events in order to connect and discover info and share happy moments
• To measure product success, we could look at meaningful actions (activation and engagement) or simply, events booked or attended (conversions). 
• Let's focus on driving activation for the new product to be

• supply-side: Event creators or providers
  • 2C Individual / Private (performers, educators, etc.)
  • 2B Organization
  • 2B Service Agency / Venues
• demand-side: Event seekers or attendees
  • Domestic or Local
  • International or Cross-Border

Based on impact and opportunity size, I will prioritize (1) individual creators (such as comedians) from the supply-side, and (2) domestic events from the demand-side. Because a lot of indoor live performance venues shut down due to the pandemic with an unknown schedule. 

1. It's difficult to engage with my audience virtually (frequent, urgent）

2. It's difficult to cultivate my fan base online

3. It's difficult to gain new audience's attention 

While we might hope to create a general-purpose software to create delightful and useful event gathering. The 1st MVP will be focusing on solving comedians' core pain points. It could be generalized to other solo artists and performers, educators, etc.

1. Ice-Breaker 
   • Design smooth interaction for all parties to see responses to simple ice breaker question (word cloud, etc.)
   • Online whiteboard with sticky notes to share thoughts or look at images together 
2. Vivid sound experience
   • a repo of smart sound effects, played by audience or host
3. VR experience where the performer's physicality is projected into a live video (similar to V-tuber)

Clarifying question:

Candidate: Is the goal of the product to further strength the google ecosystem by serving increasing more number of customer use cases and provide more incentize for the people to join in the google network.

Interviewer: Yes

Candidate: Is a event gather app or a website?

Interviewer: App

User segments: 

1) Professional networks such as engineering association, toastmasters, computer hobbyists, etc.

2) Community organization that do volunteer activities for the neighborhood

3) Business organizing events for special occasion such as new year, christmas, etc

4) Family and Friends get-together

5) Affinity groups that support minority communities such as LGBT, Physically disabled.

6) Interest groups that want to organize group activities such as dance, sports, hiking, etc.

Prioritize user segment:

I would want to prioritize the user segment that are currently under-served, which is the interest groups that want to congregate the people with similar interests.

Pain points:

I am going to describe the activitives that need to be facilitated to organize and deliver a successful event. 

A) People are unable to find others that have similar interests be it in sports, cultural activities such as dance, hobbies such as bird watching, hiking, etc. in their neighborhood.

B) People lack tools to invite others, plan and organize group actitivies 

C) People are in need of information brochure or catalog that provide the venues that are fit for various group activites such as foot ball play ground, basket ball court, volley ball court, dance malls, etc.

D) People require assistance to book a venue to organize the events

E) People need a live tracker to keep track of the estimate arrival time of the different participants in a group 

F) People would appreciate a tool to rate their experince around the event and ask questions around the event.

Solutions:

Pain point:

A) Build an events app that people can download and signup to find the other with similar interest in the neighborhood.

Impact: High since there is no such service availble today in the market

Effort: High it involves the development of the app end to end

B) Inclue a feature that would enable the people to post an event for others to see and interest people can RSVP

Impact: moderate since similar features are offered by competitors

Effort: moderate since it will use the existing technologies

C) Build an catalog based on the crowd sources information that are submitted by the business that own the venues or communities that own the neighborhood places

Impact: High it will be rich in information and business have an incentive to sign up to expand to out reach to the customers

Effort: low

D) Build an automative AI that would make a call to venue based on the event schedule proposed by the organizer and update the organizer and the group when the booking is confirmed.

Impact: High, it will be unique feature that reduce the burden on the organized and allievate stress and delight the customers

Effort: High , it will involve building new AI capabilities to automate the reversation process.

E) Building a live tracker that tracker the participant movements and their estimated arrival time to the venue. We will mask their origin location and their movement, we will just show the estimated arrival time to protect their privacy.

Impact: High, it saves multiple phone calls and  other related communciation for status update

Effort: high, it need to live track their movements and the live traffic to estimate the arrival time

F) Build a review system that let the users to rate their experience and post questions. This wil incentise people to be on their best behavior to ensure the success of the event.

Impact: High, it helps to build trust among the participants

Effort: low, we can leverage the existing google review systems and tools

Conclusion:

Events app will serve the customers need that are currently not well addressed and will help to further strength the google ecosystem and increase the value of the google community.

Answer:

I would structure my response in the following manner. I would first clarify the objective and assumptions to be made. Next, I would discuss various user segments followed by identifying the most common user journey in the process of organizing/attending an event. I would then propose a solution, discuss its feasibility, customer impact and risk involved. I would then conclude with success metrics, and what would future for this product might look like. 

We can broadly classify the users into organizers and attendees. Is the objective of this product to address the needs of organizers who are internal employees and partners or external. -> Let's go with Internal/Partners.

Problem statement: Build a product for Google's employees to organize and manage events with the goal of increasing user adoption of google products and data collection to help improve products. 

Next, I am listing types of events that could be held by Google's Tech team, Marketers and PR. 

Here, I am identifying user journey while organizing an event with the intent of identifying most common pain points.

• Sending invites
• Securing a location 
• Preparing schedule for pre and event day involving speakers, any installations etc.
• Arrange food and beverages

• How do I get a list of invitees
• What is the platform to communicate with the event committee and participants
• How to design the event with the relevant message 
• How to estimate number of attendees 

• address book
• users registered for events
• pre-defined design templates 
• integration to post event in search banner, other social media with an intermediate PR approval step.
• A chatbot with canned responses about the event 
• A slack channel for event organizers/internal attendees

Is it seperate APP or one of the existing?==>Youchoose

Any particular type of event?==>You choose

Any specific market/user segment?==>You choose

Market SF

GOAL  user experience of an event

Segments

Organizers

Invitees

Picking user segment as Organizer as it relatively more difficult to organize the event than to attend and I would want to see how google Can help the organizers

Needs of Organizers

1. Finding place/time (one time decision)

2. Deciding theme, decorating, food/booze ⇒(most difficult and time consuming)

3. Inviting/re inviting==>(most difficult and time consuming)

4. Entertaining==>Important but secondary

5. Capture/share photos==>Most needed from users point of view

6. Splitting cost/ collection of money ==>Important but secondary

Prioritizing based on the impact and usefullness

7. Deciding theme, decorating, food/booze

8. Inviting/re inviting

9. Capture/share photos==>Most needed from users point of view

Solutions

For Deciding theme, decorating, food/booze

1. Based on time,location, invitees, holidays, etc suggest themes

2. For borrowing supplies, has a marketplace/communities for lending/borrowing supplies like ping pong table, coolers, containers

3. Based on the invitees profile (and google's knowledge of user base)

   1. suggest number of vegetarians, vegan,s non-veg

   2. Suggest foods, booze

For Inviting/re inviting

4. App auto creates a list of attended people from previous similar parties or by same hosts adds them into list of potential invitees

For Capture/share photos

5. Face detection==>send photos in same room, bluetooth proximity (private only event)

6. Suggest people to add from face detection ????(private event only)

Based on the impact and usefulness I suggest to go with Solution 2. It's gonna save money for organizers and for the lenders they will be able to make some money. Some of the party/event supplies are costly and one doesn't get to use them so often

Tradeoff

1. Trust factor that supplies will not be damaged and returned. Need to create review system for  lenders and borrowers so users can see review before making transaction

Key Success metrics

1. MAU of the APP

2. Avg no. of transaction made/user

Design a product for event gathering for Google

Here's how I'll be approaching the problem

1) clarify the scope/goals + north star metric for the product,

2) identify the customers

3) Identify the TG and their needs/pain points/opportunities 

4) pick the MVP scope/short term scope for the product

Context 

Google is building this - what are the strengths/capabilities of google that can be leveraged 

- Search 

-YouTube video

-Google calendar

- AI/ML capabilities 

Clarity 

What do you mean by event gathering for google ? is it to plan help organise events held by Google or anybody can use it to set up events built by google, I'm assuming it's the latter

What kind of events? I'm assuming physical/online both (given the covid situation)

What part of the event? is it organising the event or attending an event, I'm assuming the latter 

Is this a specific goal? I'm assuming no specific goal, built the best suited product 

Is this an app or a site or a feature? we'll take this call later once we have a better understanding of our customers 

Is there a specific geography?

What kind of events - is it personal or commercial, I feel given Google's competencies you can go in either direction but personal tends to be social events which Facebook has a strong hold of given the network effect and commercial is where its a less locked in + matches google's enterprise ambitions.

Commercial - conferences, trade shows and seminars.

I want to focus on conferences, seminars in theory should be a sub set of the features we discuss.

Conferences have a physical element and a digital element - I see an opportunity to create value using google's capabilities.

Metrics

Number of people attending events via google events will help us capture the value being created however its a lagging metric to balance we can tracknumber of people invited to events in the next week/month.

Who's the customer

Customer groups can largely be broken down into 

• Event attendees
• Event organisers ( this includes event organising company)

in theory orgnisers need to cater to attendee's needs for a successful event so targeting event organisers should help us cover core needs of both cohorts.

A typical user journey is 

• Organiser want to organise a physical event - it may be happening for the first time or might be a repeating annual event
• Organisers makes sure that even doesn't clash with any other major events/holidays 
• Organiser figure out a venue in line with number of participants expected, costs/budgets
• once venue is finalised, organiser sends out a mailer to all potential participants/publishes to the site that registrations are open
• Participants start signing up - to register participants go to a site where they get more details/ punch in relveant detials to sign up
  • for paid events: They may need to pay, once paid they'll be issue a receipt that they can use to claim entry
• Confirmation mais are sent out 
• participants show up for the event by commuting locally or long distance,  organisers check them in - ensure only those who are eligible enter 
• participants are given badges 
• Participants socialise, participants ideally want to network 
• Event is over, people disburse 

Pain points/opportunities

• Identifying venues/talking to venues 
• identifying dates
• email list 
• Ensuring you only take as many entries as your event permits
• Setting up payments
• Issue of badges/badge creation 
• Managing entry of people 

In line with the above we need to solve for the following

• Auto suggest dates in line with holiday/major events by competition( you can specify competition): high impact, medium cost, innovative PICK
• Venue list in line with budget/capacity/location constratints ( for example for international events youd want to pick hotels with enough rooms+close to airport within a budget etc): high impact, low cost (google already has this info via maps in some form), fits in well with google's existing strength  PICK
• Email invite service - users are sent an invite with event details and link to site, typically a rich image + site link, we can maintain email list by historical event, hygiene requirement PICK 
  • also handle confirmation mail post sign up  hygiene requirement PICK 
  • generate QR code to manage entry  hygiene requirement PICK 
• payment management: For paid events typically you'll need to collect payments, payment gateway sets up are expensive and not a google strength. We can outsource/integrate with a list of partners. DO NOT PICK
• Orgnaisers have the option to live stream the event via Youtube(given the current covid scenario this will be in demand), low reach, high impact. PICK
• Commute planning: attendees are given the option to integrate event with their calendar app/google calendar, participants can follow google assistant's instruction to plan their commute, high reach, high impact, innovative, leverages google's strengths PICK

Finally will this be an app or a feature? it's a standalone app/site that integrates with google calendar/other google services as per need