You'll get access to over 3,000 product manager interview questions and answers
Recommended by over 100k members
Clarification Question 👨🏻💻
- How do you define user engagement for WA? [Define yourself]
— IMO, the mission of FB/WA is to connect people from around the world — and people connect with each other on WA majorly through texts. So the core activity will be texting and then the sub-core activity can be sending pic/video, get added into groups, text into groups, adding stories, adding display pictures, etc
— For the sake of simplicity, let's say texting is the major contributor to user engagement for WA
- Is this for WA mobile or WA web? [Define yourself]
— Let's focus on WA mobile
- Is this Business WA or normal WA? [Define yourself]
— normal WA
- What's wrong with user engagement? any decline in numbers? can I get any number around [Define yourself]
— Let's say WA wants to increase the feature usage (#activities) per user per day
Summarising the WA activities here:
- send/receive texts (individually or in groups also)
- get added into groups
- add story
- add display picture
- use any non-core features (like payment, send auto expired images/videos (like Snapchat), etc)
Define User Groups 🧑🏻🔧
— Students
— Working Professionals
— Elder people
— People with very weak internet
To narrow down the scope of the solution - let's focus on the Working Professionals for now
— Dave is 28 years working professional, who works at a startup as PM - he is leading the products for the supply chain, and for that, he needs to communicate with Ops & Supply Chain folks on regular basis - for communication, he uses email, slack or WA but he relies more on WA because the TAT to reply is very lower on WA and he uses it very frequently. Also, he is in multiple groups - some are friends & family type groups and some are official groups and some are just advertisement & support channels that he has joined to get support or learn about a certain topics or get news or something. He typically says that he spends almost 2 hours daily on WA and gets a lot of work done with this platform. He is actually happy with the product.
— But he has some pain points where he thinks WA could improve and provide a better experience
Define Pain Points for the user group 😪
- He gets added to multiple groups by his friends/colleagues where he doesn't want to go
- He gets a lot of broadcasted, forwarded messages which he doesn't want to get at all
- He gets direct messages from an unknown sometimes intentional sometimes wrong number
- He gets a lot of messages from Ad Agencies
- Sometimes he would like to star or pins texts which he would like to get back later but he forgets as the text get lost in lots of messages from folks on WA
- Sometimes he would like to categorize a few messages as IMPORTANT, TO GET BACK, SAVE, etc so that he can take action accordingly
- Sometimes he wants to put periodic DND so that he doesn't receive texts on WA (or get disturbed) in that time period also it should be shown to other users
Solution 🦸🏻
- Preview group messages & folks in it - where he is being added
- Limit on forwards - spam messages which are being circulated
- There should be a preview along with text & pic check for explicit content so that it can be spammed and shown to the user (just like fb/inta)
- same as 3 along with a big discard button (because we would like users to discard the unwanted ads)
- PIN it so that he should get a reminder to reply to the pinned messages
- PIN and save it into a bucket - Action feature where user can select messages save into a bucket
- Periodic DND feature where a DND icon will be shown to the user
Any Risks 🙅🏻
— There are a few risks. 1. WA is known for its simplicity and if we add features like sol 7 or sol 6 - users may feel annoyed so we should be doing a deliberate validation research and testing so that we should be aware of such risks and negotiate on it
— 2. Ads Agency would not like such features where Ads are getting spammed - this could lead to
Summarize! 🍕🍕
Whatsapp - you can do 1-1 chat, group chat. Businesses can chat with you - I believe there is a business version of the app also. I have never used the business app, so dont know much about it.
Whatsapp vision: Make it easy and free to talk to your friends and family. They used your phone contacts list as the social network.
If I look at the strategic objectives for Whatsapp - the key ones that come to mind are
a/ Acquiring new users
b/ Increasing engagement with existing users
c/ Monetization
Is there any particular objective you would like me to focus on?
And within customers, we have 2 types - consumers and businesses.
I would like to focus on increasing engagement of consumers.
1/ I am prioritizing acquiring new users as lower because Whatspp already have 2.5B+ users. There are probably 5B mobile users in the world. Of which 1B are in China, which is a closed market. So whatsapp already has 60% market share. So they seem to be doing reasonably well there.
2/ Prioritizing monetization lower. Monetization will come if user base is high and user engagement is high. Monetization can be higher priority, if there is clear directive strategically, but since I am not aware, I am prioritizing lower.
Driving engagement: 2.5B users. There are several ways to measure engagement - DAUs, amount of time spent / DAU, Number of messages exchanged/DAU, Number of actions taken/DAU etc. DAUs is probably the primary metric, with amount of time spent as secondary metric. My goal will try to improve multiple metrics through improvements.
Lets look at key use cases enabled by whatsapp.
1/ 1-1 chat. Text, voice, video, file sharing
2/ 1-many chat
3/ P2P Payments - I think this is possible in some countries. Not in US.
4/ Interact with SMBs - customer support, talking to businesses.
We can try to improve all of these. I will focus on 1-1 chat for 3 reasons a/ I think its probably the most used use case. 2/ Most feature improvements that we make for 1-1, will carry over to 1-many, and SMBs also, 3/ These features can be rolled over globally irrespective of regulatory issues (unlike payments etc which are probably country specific). There maybe technical limitations though.
Lets look at the user journey for 1-1 chat
1/ Open the app:
a/ I have an intent to send a message. Or plan to check the received messages.
b/ Prompted by a notification and open the app
c/ See the unread messages notification on the app and open it
Pain points:
a/ I get a lot of notifications from group chats which are not relevant. Notifications become noisy.
b/ I see 30 unread messages icon. I dont know if its coming from 1-1 chats (which I maybe more interested) or from group chats. I want to know if I got the message from the person I am interested without opening the app.
2/ I find the person I want to contact
3/ I “talk to them” in real-time, or send a message (text, recording, file) async
Lets focus on chat.
Problems and possible solutions
a/ I find that non-tech savvy people, like my mom, find it cumbersome to search for someone and call or text. They would like to just say “call vamsi”. Or “send message to vamsi” and that in their own language. High priority -- lot of people in this age group. Also convenient even for us -- makes it easy to just use it.
S: Make it voice activated. Transcribe voice to text and send. Why does she need to even type anything?
b/ Many times when I call, I find that it rings from my side, but the other person actually doesnt get the ring.
S: This almost is a bug. WE should fix it.
c/ When I call, if the other person doesnt have internet, then I cannot reach him.
S: If the other person doesnt have internet, then switch to telephone network. - this could be offered as a fee.
d/ When I want to see previous messages I have from a person, I cannot search those messages.
S: Ability to search text, meta data tag images using computer vision, transcribe audio and make it searchable.
4/ Finish the conversation and close the app.
Clarification - whatsapp is a messanger used for communication vis image, text, video etc between individuals or sets of individuals, groups. any specific country, any specific platform - answer - take web+mobile and US
Goal - inc user engagement - what it means - new users? more interactions? - answer - more interactions/engagement
User groups - on the basis of interactions - 1) personal interaction (friends, families), 2) business/work/within organization interaction, 3) public group interaction (city group, activit groups etc, enquiries). Looking at our goal and immediate impact I will go with business/work interactions as frequency of those interactions is higher - more usage, more engagement, more data to track. Also fb mission is to connect all kinds of users - during COVID even more important.
Painpoints:
1) Add people not in your contact list
2) One project group may have different sub groups and conversation within one group is not for everyone casuing lot of people to scroll messages. - need for subgroups within groups
3) Person may get added by mistake
4) people might not be comfortable with showing private profile
5) too many attachments to handle esp for people working in multiple projects.
6) notification when not near phone or web app is not on - missing important mail
7) overall trust with anyone can see your phone and open whatsapp, trust on facebook
Prioritized painpoint basis level of pain point impact, # of users it affects etc: 1, 2, 4,7. For 5, initially people may not transfer completely to whatsapp based work conversation so will park this for later. For 6, this is a med-low painpoint.
Solutions:
1) Allow inviting people using email address - integration with gmail, outlook; tradeoff I dont know how the partnership/integratuion will work.
2) Within one group allow creating different subgroups - Project group - below that can be small bubble with different subgroups.
3) Have a separate whatsapp for business app
4) integrate whatsapp business profile within same app with two toggles - private and business; trade off might confuse users initially when using two toggles
5) trust - user types password everytime they open whatsapp for business profile
6) company authenticated whatsapp for business - SSO/SAML for business profile; tradeoff - this may lead to annoying user exp and may not be available on mobile.
7) Additional security software added by FB, more marketing on what they are doing to improve security
Solutions prioritized - (basis impact and effort and ease of implementation and FB mission) - 1, 2, 4,6
Metrics - # of business profiles creates, Avg time spent on whatsapp/user, # of interactions/group
Objective: To increase user engagement on WhatsApp platform
1. Starting with what is Whatsapp- Messenger platform where users can message/ voice call/ video call with other users and businesses.
2. Highlighting top user personas
- Students
- Working professionals
- Casual communication - Only chat with friends/ family (all demographics)
3. Selecting the user persona of students here. Mainly because of COVID-19, users are interacting closely with peers/ teachers/ colleges through online platforms.
Top Painpoints-
- Get schedule/ reminders for meetings/ classes- There is no provision to set reminders or to see calendar view in Whatsapp
- Filtering and searching for main images and videos- Even though user can mark a particular image/ video as starred, no provision to tag images under different categories to check later. Ex: Related to a particular subject/ course
- Whatsapp resources for students- As a student who wants to keep informed of latest news and get in touch with dream colleges/ recruiters, there is no search/ content available within Whatsapp.
4. Potential solution to solve pain points
- Calendar/ Meeting scheduler- Users can set reminders for meetings as agreed on chat and can see meeting calendar.
- Image/ video tagging - Provision to tag images/ videos with pre-defined as well as customized categories. Users can see the tagged content in 'starred' section. Every time users want to browse through important Whatsapp content, they need not browse through the device gallery. (Tags can also be added to images/ videos title when saved to device)
- Provision for users to follow colleges/ recruiter/ teacher accounts. There can be a business section separately where users can search and follow. Users can also chat with them or follow daily updates shared. This will be really helpful to keep a tab on latest updates.
5. List of solutions
- Calendar/ Meeting reminders-
User Satisfaction- High ; Engagement Potential- Medium ; Effort- Medium
Engagement Metric:
MAU- Number of users using meeting/ calendar feature
Number of meetings/ calls done on whatsapp from Calendar
- Image/ Video tagging-
User Satisfaction- High; Engagement Potential- High; Effort- Low
Engagement Metric-
Number of images/ videos tagged
Number of users using tag feature
Session time- Time spent per user on this section
- Businesses accounts for Education category-
User Satisfaction- High; Engagement potential- High; Effort- Medium; Monetization Potential- Medium/ High
Engagement metrics-
MAU- Number of users browsing 'businesses' section
Increase in users following accounts
Session time- Time spent by users on business accounts.
6. Prioritizing/ Tradeoffs
As all the solutions are estimated to have high user satisfaction and engagement potential, prioritizing based on ' effort' and additional 'monetization potential'
Summarizing solution - Provision of 'Image/ video' tagging where users can browse content in Whatsapp itself. Also provision to follow and engage with 'Business accounts for Education Category' solutions.
#Please review and suggest on the solution.
The steps for answering this product improvement question.
Step 1: Ask the following clarifying questionsAre we considering whatsapp mobile only or does it include whatsapp web as well? Mobile
Are we concentrating on any specific specific regions? No
Step 2: User Personas:Individuals --> want to engage with their contacts.
Students
Working professionals
Old age people
Businesses --> want to engage with users through Whatsapp
Startups
Big Corporations like banks, insurance companies
Step 3: Identifying one personaFor our discussion, lets take students as the user group for whom we are going to improve the engagement.
Step 4: Pain Points or Use CasesStudents receive lot of website links in Whatsapp and on Cliking it would open in any other browser. Additional click to open an external application like chrome or firefox. They have to again navigate back to Whatsapp to continue reading the messages or they might not even come back to whatsapp.
Students would be interested in recent trends or follow topics happening around the world to keep them updated.
They love sharing in social media applications like Facebook and Instagram.
Would be interested in selling items like old books, computers, mobiles.
Step 5: Features which would relieve thier pain or gain promotersIntroducing Whatsapp inbuilt browser --> Users on clicking the links or URLs in the messages, the same would be opened in the browser built within whatsapp. By doing this we can ensure that the user still remains in whatsapp.
Introducing Share option --> Allowing the users to share the pictures or messages in Facebook or Instagram [ Only Facebook owned ]. This will increase the engagement on the same FB world of apps.
Introducing Whatsapp Content Feed --> Allowing users to follow topics like News, Sports, Movies and whatsapp would deliver curated content from official sources. This also avoids Fake News.
Introducing Sales --> Users can post items for sale similar to whatsapp status and anyone on thier contact can buy them instantly using Whatsapp Pay.
Step 6: Priortization based on impact VS cost analysisF1 Inbuilt Browser - High Impact - Medium cost
F2 Share option - Medium Impact - Low cost since the integrations are with FB environment apps like Instagram and FB.
F3 Content Feed - High Impact - Low cost
F4 Sales - High impact - High cost [ Payment integration]
Based on the above matrix, I would suggest us to build the inbuilt browser and content feed first.
Step 7: Tracking through metrics:Inbuilt Browser :
No. of links opened per day / per month using inbuilt browser.
Avg Time spent in the inbuilt browser per day / per user [Time spent in the inbuilt browser is actually the time spent in whatsapp]
No. of users returning to messages after viewing the websites in the inbuilt browser
Content Feed:
Avg time spent by the users in reading the content / day or month
No. of topis followed per day / month
No. of articles read by the users / day or month
Step 8: FinallyI recommend whatsapp to introduce an inbuilt browser and content feed feature to increase the engagement and measure them through the metrics mentioned.
FB + Whatsapp Mission: To allow people to communicate with anyone in the world and in doing so bring the world closer together. Thus aligns with overall FB goals.
Business Goal: To improve user engagement with WhatsApp.
Key Users:
Developed Country Users
Consumers - New, active users, groups
Local Businesses, Brands
Developing Country Users
Consumers - New users, Active users, Groups
Local Businesses, Brands
Choosing to focus on developing country use cases cause that is the largest market for Whatsapp and a small change will also have a big impact on the goal of engagement. Specific target segments I want to focus on will be the consumer segment since that is the biggest user base.
Key Uses Cases and Problems:
Onboarding for new users and activating them
Texting - Hard to type things, lack of local fun mostly western keyboards and western gifs. Sharing links. Too much spam and rumors being forwarded.
Voice call - Poor voice quality, background noises
Video Chat - Low data, bandwidth issues
Ordering groceries - Communicating with a store that also has a user account and not a business WhatsApp account. Using it to submit orders, transacting and paying the store.
Key Problems:
Onboarding for users coming on to WhatsApp using feature phone earlier
Communicating
Hard to text users in their local language, lack of local language fun
Bad voice call quality
Rumors and fake news
Hard to order groceries and managing payments
Choosing to focus on solving onboarding (table stakes), and communication problems.
Key Ideas:
Redesigned onboarding tutorial for new users in developing countries with tooltips and voice commands. Gamify it by asking them to complete a set of key actions and become a true active user.
Themes+Sticker Add Ons - Allow users to buy stickers package (stickers, local one-liners etc) that will allow them to express themselves in a much more fun way. User can discover these via the same key board section where they find Gifs etc.
Whatsapp Broadcast - To remove rumors and fake news - Reduce the spread of misinformation by staring a WhatsApp broadcast for local and national markets. FB/Whatsapp will basically use a given users phone # to understand their locale and inform about the top trending rumors in their area/country and along with facts. I would need some partnership with the government to get their endorsement for this to make sure users truly trust the information shared by WhatsApp.
E-commerce payments for local stores that people may be using to make payments. QR code or Venmo like experience where you pay the user via Whatsapp and keep a complete record of the transaction history. It can even be extended to pay utility bills etc.
Prioritized List
Based on the impact on UX and eng cost the following features come up in the priority order:
Onboarding Tutorial (Table stakes)
Stickers + Add Ons (MVP)
Whatsapp broadcast
E-commerce payments
Success Metrics:
DAU, WAU for users (sliced by age)
#of users activated after onboarding
#of stickers and one liners used.
- Whatsapp Chat
- Whatsapp Pay
- Whatsapp Business
- List items
- Menus
- Support
- Interactions with businesses
- Whatsapp communities
- Whatsapp status
- Young adults/teens - 13 yrs to 20 yrs
- Professionals - 21- 60 yrs
- Elders - 60+
Place | Journey | Pain Point | Severity |
Home | Wake up and have a morning routine. | Unable to track morning routine and so this becomes erratic | L (This is something all professionals want to do but can't seem to) |
Office | Meetings | Take down meeting notes in another app | S (notes can be taken on another app. Also not sure if we can use personal apps to take down official notes) |
Calls/Messages in the middle | Can't see if there are some important messages from someone | L (If someone is not well etc. and they are trying to call/message I don't actually see) | |
Like someone's t-shirt and want to buy it | Need to ask them and then they will give the name of some shop. | S (Not so much of a pain point. I can ask the brand and look for it online) | |
Write down important thoughts that come up | Currently open notes or some other note taking app and write it. But sharing this with someone is a challenge especially cross platform. | M (Currently, people open notes and type in their thoughts and share it via whatsapp) | |
Home | Pick up stuff on the way | No checklist currently that I can cross off on whatsapp | L ( I have to go through the whole list again to see what I have purchased and what I have not) |
Go for a movie | Can't save movie tickets. I have to send it to someone and then open it in whatsapp | NA (currently you can send the tickets to yourself also) | |
Message while driving | Have to type while I drive | L (Typing while driving is dangerous, and Siri is not reliable for typing) | |
Go to bed | NA | NA |
From the above we will take the below 4 points and brainstorm on solutions.
Pain Point | Solution | Impact on Engagement | Engineering Effort |
Unable to track morning routine and so this becomes erratic | Add and create a routine. This tracker can also give you how many days you have continuously followed this routine and can help make you better. | L (A large percentage of people want to be more productive) | L (Not rocket science but will need the entire workflow to be built out) |
Create a routine based on observations. A lot of people open whatsapp as the first thing that they do after waking up. Use this information and best practices of routines to create a custom routine tracker for the user and have them edit it to their liking | -ve (Impact could be negative because whatsapp's value proposition is primary, so they may feel like they are being tracked) | L ( A new model will probably have to be built for this) | |
Important messages in the middle of the meeting | Visual indication of an emergency/important message along with a special sound that is different from the normal message sound. This sound can be configured by the user. As a start we can have some siren kind of sound | L (This does have an impact on engagement but may even have -ve impact if people feel that they will mark a message as important if it really needs to be read) | S |
We can also automatically check for important words like emergency/heart attack etc. in personal chats (not group chats) and automatically trigger an emergency workflow | M (This is something we can do for certain types of key words but it comes back to the privacy question because we are saying we don't read anybody's messages) | M (depending on whether we have a list of words, or we need to build a model to do this, the effort will vary | |
No checklist that I can cross off | Allow users to create and share check lists | L (Users will create and share checklists) | S (relatively small effort as just a simple workflow needs to be built) |
Allow users to import/share checklists from Notes/Alexa etc. | L | S(APIs exist for most of these apps, so this should be a small effort) | |
If you have a msg that says bring "ABC" or get "DEF", create a checklist in the You message section and notify the user accordingly | S (maybe -ve because of privacy concerns) | M | |
Have to type while I drive | have templates such as "I am driving" or "I am on my way". Trigger that when people call/msg but you cannot pick up the phone | M (It is a good problem to solve but might not impact engagement much) | S |
From the accelerometer and/or GPS, you can automatically pre-populate the message and then just confirm with the user if you can send the message. | S (good problem to solve but might not improve engagement much) | S |
Based on the above information, in the short term, I would like to focus on the ability to create checklists, supporting emergency messaging and import checklists to whatsapp, while in the long term, I would also like to create features that help them build and track habits.
Also, as noted above one risk with the emergency messaging is that people might stop reading messages throughout the day unless they are marked important, so average engagement could come down. We could do a launch in one country, check the metrics before doing a wider rollout.
- Unable to track morning routine and so this becomes erratic
- Can't see if there are some important messages from someone
- No checklist currently that I can cross off on whatsapp
- Have to type while I drive
- Add and create a routine. This tracker can also give you how many days you have continuously followed this routine and can help make you better.
- Visual indication of an emergency/important message along with a special sound that is different from the normal message sound. This sound can be configured by the user. As a start we can have some siren kind of sound
- Allow users to create and share check lists
- Allow users to import/share checklists from Notes/Alexa etc.
There are some risks associated with these, which we have also listed above
- Student (Genz) : College or School students who use WhatsApp for communication with friends. Sharing assignments, and notes. Creating group for the class, trip many more purposes.
- elderly people: people who are in their 50+. Having sufficient time to talk and read messages. eager to grab recognization in their social circle so sent many messages and reply on sender's most off messages.
- Small business owner/ Reseller: share catalog with their customer. talk to them and generate leads.
Clarifying questions:
1. Is there a particular business KPI we are looking to move? If not, I would chose to move the engagement metric as its the north star KPI for whatsapp.
2. Any platform or resource constraints?
Business objective:
I would like to increase user engagement through improvements. Whatsapp's mission is to let people communicate with each other without barriers.
User personas:
Individual users that use a personal account
Business users that use a business account
Whatsapp platform
I would like to select individual users that use a personal account for this discussion. Let's break down into user segments, zoning in on group users:
1. Group users that have muted group messages and are not active in groups.
2. Active group users that check their group messages and participate in groups. Sending atleast 3 messages per week, or engaging with atleast 3 messages per week.
I would like to generate pain points for #2
Pain points/Needs:
1. I'd like to schedule meetings in the group, as group members don't remember when they have to be get on a group call.
2. I'd like whatsapp to remind me of important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries of group members (Especially family and friends), so I can wish them.
For the interest of this exercise, I'd like to explore pain point #2
Solutions:
1. Ability to set reminders in groups: Allow admin users to set reminders for members in the group. It has the following features:
a. One time or recurring reminder with a start date and end date
b. Customize the text for the reminder
c. It is delivered in the form of a whatsapp text in the group
KPIs:
1. Awareness:
Number of group users that discover setting reminders
2. Adoption:
Number of group users that set reminders/total number of groups
3. Retention:
Number of users creating reminders in multiple groups
I’ll start with what WhatsApp(WA) is- WA is a messenger platform where users can send messages/voice calls/video calls with other people for free.
Before digging deeper, let me clarify some questions:
What does engagement mean?
- increased user interactions/engagement on the platform
- new users coming to the platform
For now, we are focusing on increased user interactions/engagement on the platform.
Is there something wrong with user engagement? any decline in numbers?
WA wants to increase engagement per user per day.
Business Goals: WA wants to increase the number of activities per user per day.
User Segment:
Based on the kind of interactions, I can think of these user segments:
- Individuals: who use WhatsApp for their personal communication with friends/family.
- Working Professionals: who use WhatsApp for their professional work with their team
- Local Businesses: who runs their business operations through WhatsApp (These do not include WhatsApp Business accounts).
Prioritizing User Segment:
For our discussion, I am considering the Working Professionals for whom we are going to improve the product.
Why Working Professionals?
- Post-Covid, remote-working has grown exponentially. This means these professionals rely heavily on these platforms to communicate faster and effectively with their teams. Hence, their app usage time is relatively high and can be power users.
- Even if WA introduces some premium features in the future, these people are more capable of using and paying for them.
Pain Points:
- These professionals use WA for their personal communications also, which means it is flooded with teams chats, personal groups, communities, friends, family and distracts the users while working.
- Working means having tons of meetings and users have to rely on other calendars/products for reminders (like Google Calendar).
- Unable to find poll/quizzes options where the team can brainstorm together.
- Difficulty in categorizing important messages, videos, images.
- Difficulty in sharing large files among the groups/teams (as WA supports file size up to 100MB only)
Solutions:
- Creating a separate screen after Chats screen as “WORK” where users can have entirely professional communication with team members and groups. Users can mark these contacts as “Work” and they’ll be transferred to the Work screen.
- Users can get notifications/meeting reminders so that their work is aligned with the scheduled events and they don’t have to leave the platform to check their schedules every time.
- Provide a poll and quiz option in the attachment section so that teams can run these polls and quizzes for brainstorming and decision-making.
- Users can mark these messages, videos, images as important that they can access anytime when they click on more actions (3 dots) and it has an “IMPORTANT” option.
- Users rely on other platforms like Gmail, Slack, etc for sharing large files >100Mb. Increasing this file size makes sure users won’t leave the platform to do these tasks.
Prioritization: Based on the RICE framework, the following features come up in priority order:
- Create a separate WORK Screen.
- Provide poll/quiz options
- Mark as Important
- Increase file size
- Get notifications/meeting reminders
Success Metrics:
- Increase in session time
- Number of messages, videos, images shared
- Number of polls/quizzes created and shared
Prelim questions:
- (Why) What is the objective behind improvement? User experience or User acquisition or improve revenue?
- (What) For mobile or desktop?
- (Who) Do you have any persona in mind as target audience?
Selected Objective: User experience cause heavy penetration of app for all devices and no pre-defined persona.
Personas:
- Heavy users: Extroverts on social media, very active on groups and texting. Who prefers texting as a medium of communication
- Low usage users: Ambiverts. Uses social media and messages friends in free time.
- Occasional users: Prefers calls as a medium of communication or on other texting channels, etc.
- Businesses: Marketing, post sales services.
Select persona- Low usage users - they are familiar with platform, with improved user experience they spend more time on the app.
Needs/Pain points:
Individual messaging:
- Want to reply later but forgets
- Don’t want to be rude but want to know the message (feature already exists)
- Don’t want to be contacted at certain time
- ToDo action pending property to a message.
Group messaging:
- Don’t want to be added to groups
- Don’t know if the conversation is important or not
- Want to be active, but don’t know how to
Solutions/Features:
- Reminder to reply to messages
- Schedule replies
- Notes, reminders and Calendar tag to options for TODO lists and etc.
- Want to be added to group? - option
Feature specific Metrics:
- Reminders added per user
- Number of Replies to scheduled messages
- Scheduled messages delivered
- No. of tags to notes, reminders, calender, etc.
Overall metrics:
- DAU/WAU/MAU
- Session time
- Reply prediction taken
Step1: Define product
Whatapp is primarily a messaging app that is used by most individuals to communicate promptly with other individuals or groups of individuals. A user can post messages, share files, photos, etc as well as execute audio/video calls for communication. The platform is offered as a mobile as well as a web app. Recently, Whatsapp introduced a payments feature as well. There is Whatsapp for Business.
Step2: Define improvement goal
Given WA is yet to reach its maturity, we'll focus on engagement as a goal to drive the platform growth further.
Step3: Define an area of focus
Given there are so many critical functionalities within WhatsApp, we will choose an area for further improvement. We'll focus on chats as that's WA core.
Step4: Define user segments
We will segment users on the basis of their level of activity
- Power users: high WA usage
- Moderate users: limited WA usage
- Dormant users: very low WA usage
We will focus on moderate users as that's a critical mass which if converted to Power users can lead to a significant uplift in engagement.
Step5: Define pain points
There are many reasons why our chosen user segment has limited WA activity on chats
Sl. No | Use Case | Reach | Impact | Score (R*I) |
1 | Conversations in the groups are not interesting to me | 5/10 | 7/10 | 35/100 |
2 | I don't get ideas on what to post in these groups | 4/10 | 7/10 | 28/100 |
3 | I find it a lot of effort to create replies for various posts | 4/10 | 5/10 | 20/100 |
On the basis of RI score, we will shortlist use case #1. Many users get added to various groups. However, they don't find those conversations interesting and hence, don't participate. We need to solve the problem of how we can make the groups interesting for such people to participate.
Step6: List Solutions
Sl. No. | Solution | Impact | Effort | Score (I/E) |
1 | Suggest interesting seeds to initiate group conversation: WA comes up with recommendations on trending and interesting ideas/news which the user can leverage to initiate conversations in a group. | 6/10 | 6/10 | 1 |
2 | Prompt an instance in a group conversation where user's interest area is mentioned: WA conveys to the user when is the right moment for him to jump into a conversation | 5/10 | 5/10 | 1 |
3 | Enable to explore new public groups which might be of interest to the user: WA allows the user to explore various groups across the globe created for specific themes | 9/10 | 4/10 | 2.25 |
On the basis of the score, we will go ahead with #3 as the solution.
Step7: Define criteria to measure success
Our hypothesis is that by enabling users to explore groups of their interest, we will be able to get Moderate users to engage more on WA chats.
Additional engagement: No. of public groups * Avg. no. of messages/public group/day
Primary metrics (engagement of moderate users)
- the Total number of public groups joined/moderate user
- Avg. no. of messages created by Moderate users/joined public group/day
Secondary metrics (engagement overall)
- Total number of public groups
- Avg. no. of messages created/public group/day
Watch metrics (should not degrade engagement in other areas)
- Avg. no. of messages created/user/day
Step8: Call out risks and identify mitigation plan
Risk 1: Mobile numbers will become public. Some users may want privacy in unknown groups - Allows users to join such groups anonymously.
@bijan @Eli Marcus please provide your feedback.
Improve engagement in whatsup app
Describe the product-
The app is used to share the quick communication in form of text, voice, picture message. It helps to connect between the people emotionally and purposefully.
Clarification/Assumptions
1. Assuming the app wants to increase the engagement on mobile version
2. Assuming that there is no restriction on age limit or governance issues on the spread of the content
3. Assuming that uniform regulations have been applied across the countries unlike China
User groups
1. Business account users- who uses the whats up for transactional purpose to spread the business activity and attract customers
2. Individual users – who uses the app casually for entertainment, sharing the information via text, videos, photos, connect with the dear ones who stays nearby or far way
Goal of the application
1. To increase the customer engagement in the application
Pain points
I would like to list down the pain points for individual users as the % of people is more who uses the whatsup and there is a sudden decline in the engagement as people are diverting to the other app like telegram
1. I feel disinterested with too many long messages. At times I read them and realises after spending good of amount of time that it was not worth spending time
2. Toom any videos, big size videos unnecessarily take away the storage space that I need to delete eventually and it wastes my time.
3. I do not want to waste my time in the data management. Too much data makes it difficult to manage the relevant data that I want to save and most of the time I end up deleting relevant data haphazardly
4. I am part of too many chat groups with dear ones having same participants who kept on sharing the similar content and thus makes it difficult to remember the exact objective of each chat group
5. I end up sending the messages to the groups where I am not suppose to send inadvertently. It is meant for some other group but by mistake I share it to some other group. I realise my mistake when people read the message and get to know about it.
6. I end up sending the incorrect messages to the individuals whose number is saved by similar name but slight variation may be in surnames. Like message is meant to be sent for Emma Paulson but I end up sending it to Emma Johnson.
Solutions
1. Understand the user choices and behaviour using some data repositories and algorithm to know what kind of information does user is looking for and when too many messages are flooded then user should get to know in for small one liner summary about the topic or broad category of them message that should create interest in the user to read it or see the video messages till end. The relevant messages per user behaviour can be highlighted or blinked in specific colours. May be text font colour and the outline of the video can be blinked in specific colour to trigger the user
2. Once the picture message is read and video is completed there should be an auto pop up message to ask the user if you want to keep a copy of it or want to delete it permanently. The whats up should also ask the user if they want to keep the message in specific folder for better data management.
3. The system should ask the user if they want to save the data as the available store is less or about to fill.
4. Three smiley feedback questionnaires can be sent periodically to the users to understand better on the interest level and engagement on the whatsup
5. A feature can be added that can help users to understand the specific goal of creating a group. Hence, they can take the decision if it is not the duplicate one and would like to join it.
6. Once the purpose of the group is defined then users should get a trigger while sending the message that is it adhering to the specific purpose of the group. If the group admin is not too strict on the purpose of it then the user should be asked if you still want to send this msg to that specific group.
7. The admin should get an ability to define the purpose of group and an ability to allow the specific type of messages adhering to the objective This may be a strict feature that should be used for special scenarios or admin can leave the decision to the message sends but a should ask them if they want to continue sending it or not
8. The system should have the ability to ask the user if you want to send the message to Emma 1 or Emma 2 as there are two people with similar first name
Prioritisation of solution
Feature | BV | Cost | Effort | Priority |
1 | H | M | M | P1 |
2 | M | M | M | P2 |
3 | L | L | L | P3 |
4 | H | L | L | P1 |
5 | H | L | L | P1 |
6 | H | L | L | P1 |
7 | H | L | L | P2 |
Evaluation
The users might find it boring to provide periodical feedback and hence might not use it on regular basis. Ability to create the group using specific might be overlooked by the users casually and they can still create the group with slight tweak in the goal description as the user group is just using the whatsup for entertainment and connecting with people.. Feature 1, 2,5 is going to break the real pain points and provide relief to the users that in turn will increase the engagement.
Core purpose of whatsapp: Enable people to communicate with each other in a private way. Core mission is to make this communication easier, and bring more people into the network.
Core personas:
1/ Users: I will prioritize focusing on users, and to enable that if I have to improve exp for businesses, we will do so.
2/ Businesses
The way I will approach this problem is to look at use cases, customer journeys, pain points and the come up with solutions for the most important problems.
Lets look at the key use cases enabled by whatsapp.
1/ Core communication exp: 1-1 chat, Group chat. Text, voice, video modes. And sending files.
2/ P2P Payments - I think this is possible in some countries. Not in US.
3/ Interact with SMBs - customer support, talking to businesses.
There are two scenarios we can consider to improve whatsapp:
1/ Improve the core communication exp:
2/ Focus on new use cases which leverage the core communication exp to provide more value for users.
At a high level both are important, and we should focus on improving the product on both fronts.
Scenario 1: Improve core communication exp.
Here the core mission is to enable communication for all. If I break that mission statement, we can think of key dimensions to drive improvement
1/ Connect more people: Keep improving whatsapp experience on low cost phones, low bandwidth geos so that more people are able to get the benefits.
b/ Break down language barriers: Especially in India, where there are so many languages, its not easy to talk to someone who speaks a different language. Basically constrains to english. If we can unlock a lot of value. For e.g, My mom should be able to talk in telugu, whereas the other person is hearing it in real-time in a different language.
c/ Make whatsapp easy for non-tech users: Voice enabled. Again, my mom is not techsavvy. Would be great if she can just talk to whatsapp instead of typing and tappin on the phone. Call Joe. Send this message to Joe. Message should be transcribed, translated so taht the receiver can get it in whatever format they want.
As we walk through the core customer journey, lets keep the above dimensions in mind to guide our product strategy.
Pain points | Priority | Soln | Cost |
Get notified/ open app I am part of groups which are not relevant to me on a daily basis. HOA group of a rental apartment I own. I use it only to post when I have to rent. I get daily 20-30 notifications. Dont want notifications from them. But, if they refer to my apartment, then I want to know. If notifications are coming from my cousins group, I would like to know. Many times I forget calling my friends, family. I would like to be reminded | H. Notifications are the primary way to get user to open whatsapp regularly, If user is overwhelmed, then it becomes useless. H Reminder notifications will initiative user engagement | Automatically determine which notifications are important. Rank message notifications based on signals such as - my interaction with a group, type of messages I responded or sent before, number of ppl in the group, whether people in the group are in my phone contact list. | L-M. This would require analyzing messages, sentiment analysis. But needs to be done on phone, since messages are encrypted outside phone. |
Find the right contact/group, communicate Poeple like my mom are not tech savvy. Make communication completely voice based. “Call Joe”, send message to Joe and dictate the message. Sent this photo to Joe. | H This benefits both elder people who are not tech savvy and younger people who are more used to voice assistants. | M-H Not sure if iOS or Android enable this. If so, whatsapp should do this. | |
Beak down language barriers Our household help in India only speaks telugu. Cant communicate to others who speak in a different langauge | M-H | Whatsapp should do translation of text, voice and video. | M-L - Translation of text message M-L - translation of voice, and video messages VH - real-time translation of voice. Main issue is doing this while protecting privacy. Some ML has to be done on device which can limit this feature only to high cost phones |
Search/ Discover is a problem My wife sent me her DL long back. Credit card. Just cant find them. Whole image is not searchable. But thats we share a lot on whatspp Simple text search works. But I cant even remember what to search for. My friend psoted his marathon complete time. I was searching for it later “marrathon timings”. But he didnt actually post the time. He posted an image which showed the time. Show groups in order of importance. Separate chats/groups into important/others etc. | H | “See” each image, video. Image - DL, Credit card, | M-H To do this, some amount of ML has to happen on the phone - OCR, transcription of video/audio, meta data tagging of visual content. |
Other minor issues in customer journey 1.Want to send text to two+ people/groups, cant do that. Have to send them separately. 2. Add a phone number to my contact list. | L-M | Send to multiple people. Should be L, but they didnt do it. | L |
Would prioritize “making notifications relevant” feature. This is one of the key motivation for users to open the app. The cost is also M-L.
Success metrics: Will do A/B test before we roll out. Key hypothesis we are testing: For people who have enabled notifications, after this feature rollout, we should see an increase in (a) number of clicks on notifications/weeks, (b) increase in number of app opens/week compared to control set.
Construction of test/control sets: 1/ Users should have enabled “show notifications”, 2/ Users who are low, medium and highly engaged, 3/ Users who actually get more than xx messages per week.
Scenario 2: Enable adjacent use cases which build on the core communication experience
1/ Payments - P2P, and paying businesses. Main transaction mechanism. So continue to invest here.
2/ Remote fitness
3/ Remote learning
4/ Experiential eCommerce with SMBs: Focus on e-commerce where there is another person who is walking you through products and convincing you to buy. Especially important for softlines such as clothes where you want the person to unwrap the clothes, show it an video and explain. Have seen this to be very effective in India where there are a lot of local businesses.
We can go deeper into Scenario 2 if we have more time.
Clarification:
Clarify what user engagement means and how it is measured ? Is it DAU, MAU #messages sent/received ? #forwards ? #voicememos sent ?
Is there any specific user segment that you would like to focus on ? Is there a specific target improvement % desired ?
Has Whatsapp seen a drop recently in user engagement ? If so any specific geographies/markets ? (Response: Not market specific, general user engagment has plateaued)
Whatsapp Mission: Is to connect the world privately by designing by designing a product which is simple to use and private.
User Segments: Whatspp is used by a wide variety of user groups and across many geographies. For the purpose of this exercise, I will consider the following user segments:
- students
- Working professionals
- Older people
Prioritizing User Segment: I will choose to focus on working professionals for this exercise.
User Pain Points:
- Working professionals get so busy throughput the day that it becomes hard for them to engage on the platform.
- They may forget to initiate a conversation
- They may just use whatsapp only as needed basis to convey pointed messages to significant others, family members etc.
- They may not want to type messages as its time consuming resulting in conversations being short.
Solutions:
1) Send a notification once a day that prompts user to initiate a conversation with their family and friends (setting can be disabled if user gets annoyed) (Effort = Low, Value = High, Impact = Medium)
2) develop an automated message initiation service that sends personalized messages to selected contacts and groups ( e.g. Happy Monday Rob ! How was the weekend ? ) (Effort = Medium, Value = High, Impact = High)
3) Develop an AI bot service that provides suggestions for responses depending on the incoming message context (Effort = High, Value = High, Impact = High)
4) Allow users to subscribe to topics of interest such as news, medication, inspirational quotes and send relevant notifications to users once or twice a day (Effort = Medium, Value = Medium, Impact = Medium)
Prioritizing Solutions:
Based on the effort/impact scale, I would priotitize 1 and 2 first to see the impact of the solutions on user engagment
Metrics to measure:
Primary Metrics
- DAU, MAU
- Avg #messages sent and received per day per user
Secondary Metrics
- Time spent on Whatsapp
- Avg Length of a conversation
GTM:
I would launch this with select target users first to gauge the impact on the above metrics before and after the launch.
Summary:
I recommend whatsapp to develop a solution targetted towards working professionals to increase the user engagement on whatsapp,
What is meant by engagement?
- More users sending messages(any type - text, image, document, video)
- More users launching the app
- More sessions per user per day
- More users view stories/status
- More users upload status
Getting users to launch the app alone will not be useful. They should be nudged to take more actions. These actions are furthering the key propositions of the application - communication. These actions would be:
- Send/receive messages - personal or group
- Upload/share status
The objective is to get users to do more such things. A key way to get into this problem would be to define the various use cases of a user as per the versions of the application:
- Personal
- Enabling regular personal communication
- Specific work-related communication
- Engaging with groups/family members through groups
- Keeping in touch with family members/friends
- Hobby groups
- Planning trips
- Social commerce
- Online shop
- Online presence of an offline shop
- Business
- Engaging with clients
- Share catalog/product
- Convert users(sales)
- Negotiate prices
- Complete a deal
- Transact
- Maintain product catalog
- Engaging with clients
Based on the above use cases, we can think of solutions on 2 broad lines:
- Integrations with some widely used tools/applications which would allow users to do a lot of their work within the app. Eg. PiP for YouTube videos
- Additional, expansive features that can increase the use cases for the users so that they use WA more often
Integrations:
- Why - Communication is a basic need and WA as a product solves it well. To make it more useful, we need to find ways of seamlessly integrating the application in a person’s routine/daily activities. This should only simplify the user experience and not create friction
- What
- Setting reminders/meetings - User can select a message and take actions, including setting a reminder. Minimal effort, simple deep integration with Google Calendar or other such applications.
- Chatbot integrations - Amazon Alexa. GA and Siri come bundled with the phone. But, Alexa can be launched as a chatbot/conversational AI on WA where regular day-to-day usage items can be ordered on Amazon through WA.
- News aggregators - Broadcast updates about events happening around the world within WA. Make interest gathering conversational.
New features:
Social commerce is a massive use case. It’s prevalent on every social media platform and we have entrepreneurs with small setups selling/reselling items. A big pain point for such users is to manage their product catalog and their client groups. We can create a catalog feature which would allow users to create and maintain a catalog which they can publish with ease in various groups. Building on top of that, WA can provide basic features to enable such businesses such as basic book-keeping, order management(manual entry of orders OR through message based action from chats). This would simplify the offline business management work for the users.
Prioritisation:
- Social commerce is a major use case due to the large user base engaged in this activity. Solving this problem is more likely to yield higher engagement.
- Integrations which offer services through WA where new products/services can utilise WA as a user acquisition channel. Think of users in Tier 3 or smaller cities who are still consuming information in traditional formats such as newspapers. They can be onboarded to e-news through WA as a conversational tool. Control the first experience, build in the stickiness.
- Calendar integrations - works for a smaller set of users. Smaller user base will get impacted, hence smaller opportunity.
We would track the engagement using the standard DAU, WAU and MAU definitions and then also break it down against each such qualifying user action to determine it’s contribution to the increase/decrease in engagement.
To summarise, we can increase engagement on WA by addressing user pain points through deeper integrations with well established tools and solving new use cases for the users. The new use cases can be determined based on the current trends. We can then pick the most suitable solution based on the TAM for it.
Whatsapp is a text and video chat product that connects us with people we know without the need of a separate unique identifier like email id or PIN.
There are 3 major use cases for which people use whatsapp for:
1. Person to Person Communication.
This is the Use Case of one to one Conversations. Generally, a user interacts with other users he knows.
2. Person to Group Communication.
This is the Use Case of Group Conversations.
A User may interact with other users whom he may or may not know.
3. Advertiser to Person Communication.
This is the Use Case of Companies reaching out to its customers via Whatsapp for important information.
Lets examine how we can improve engagement in first two.
Use Case 1: Person to Person Communication
I will discuss two user problems here.
1. Search on Whatsapp: A user may want to search something while he is chatting. He might want to give some information that may make him sound credible or intelligent during a chat. Currently, he can do this by going outside whatsapp and search on Google/any other engine. If whatsapp can give the option of a search on the App itself it will stop the user from going outside the App environment. This should be a search within the App and runs in the foreground. The search engine can be an engine already present in the market or it could be a new engine which facebook develops.
This can lead to monetisation as well as whatsapp otherwise doesn't read the messages but search query data can be used by facebook to show targeted ads to the user. Also, this might present a challenge to Google 's dominance in the search market.
The metrics i will use to track such feature would be: The Avg Chat duration with Search and without Search, The Number of search queries per active user. Checker metric would be if the user is searching and stops chatting or closes the app right after search. Hypothesis is Search should lead to longer chats,
2. Multi User Chat: Currently, more than two people cannot chat without creating a new group. Groups have their own benefits and improvement areas. Multi user chat can address the problem of people having to create temporary groups and later deleting them. A multi user chat shows up wither in a new column or as a row. This chat remains active for a week. Chat admin can invite others to the chat with a notification message going to all members.
Metric i will used to measure is Weekly Active Users, No. of invites sent, No. of Chat messages exchanged etc. Also cannibalisation to individual chats needs to be examined.
Use Case 2: Person to Group Communication.
I will discuss two problems here.
First is Group identification from Personal Chats. When i am a member of many groups and i also talk to many people, sometimes it is difficult to separate the two. Many groups are official ones and so difficult to keep track of all of them while browsing and LIFO nature of whatsapp messages.
So, there should be two sections of Chat: Individual and Groups.
Metrics i will measure will be the avg time spent scrolling per user before and after.
Second has to do with tagging feature.
When someone tags me in a group message, i do not know unless i read that conversation and take notice. When there are many groups with large conversations, this might get missed out.
Solution is to have a notification everytime i am tagged in any message, so that i can respond.
Metric to measure success is Avg Replies per user on Tag before this feature and after.
Problem: Improve user engagement on WhatsApp
Goal: Improve engagement for customers.
Scoping:
M: Is there any particular reason why you want to increase engagement? For example are you seeing a drop in any engagement metric such as number of messages/user/day?
I: No, but we would like to always improve the engagement.
M: Is the product becoming stale? Are you getting fresh users in? People might just be bored with whatsApp?
I: Yes, are acquistion numbers are doing well.
M: All over the world?
I: Yes.
Customers:
Companies, endusers, Organizations (sports, news, hospitals etc), Groups with likeminded interests
Is there a segment you would like to focus on? Any particular timeframe for this improvement
I: You can choose any of these segments and let us know why. No particular timeframe.
I would like to choose endusers keeping with the goal of why WhatsApp was formed. To allow people to communicate with each other using their phone numbers as the identity.
Pain points:
- too much spam
- Not able to discover groups of like minded people unless I know them.
- Better message threading
- Messages should be delivered to the right device and service - For example, if the user is currently connected on FB messenger my WhatsApp message must reach that person.
- More interesting content creators like News organizations, Medical institutions, Sports channels, etc
I would like to focus on the spam painpoint. In my discussion with my friends, the main reason why they have been avoiding looking at messages is because they aren't able to decipher whether it is spam or not.
Potential solutions (Impact on Engagement, Technical/cost) for reducing spam . By spam I mean all messages that are uninteresting to me.
- Create a spam protector - automatically rejects messages which have been marked as spam from coming in again and intelligently filters going forward.. (H, M-H). Protects spam across groups. i.e. same message once marked as spam doesn't keep arriving on multiple groups Uses FB's incredible AI/ML talent.
- Mark messages by importance. Give summary of which groups I should look at. (H, M)
- Ability to block people, even within a group that you may share with that person (H, L)
- Ability to mark interest areas. - So allows forwards if only in that area - (M, M)
- Thread length. Allow the user to set max thread length. - Allow long threads only if it is in interest area. Else automatically delete messages if it is not - (H,H)
Of these I would prioritize the High Impact, Medium to Low cost first.
Metrics:
Increase in number of messages/replies/forwards sent
Decrease in number of deletes without reading
Increase in average Time spent in reading messages.
Measure scroll to make sure the users read the entire message and correlate with time spent on the message.
Improved retention statistics,
Top Google interview questions
- 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
- How would you improve Google Maps?53 answers | 228k views
- See Google PM Interview Questions
Top Product Improvement interview questions
- How would you improve YouTube?29 answers | 81.3k views
- How can you improve Facebook Stories?22 answers | 45.5k views
- How would you improve Amazon?14 answers | 35k views
- See Product Improvement PM Interview Questions
Top Google interview questions
- A metric for a video streaming service dropped by 80%. What do you do?50 answers | 135k views
- Calculate the number of queries answered by Google per second.45 answers | 78.5k views
- How would you design a web search engine for children below 14 years old?36 answers | 42.9k views
- See Google PM Interview Questions
Top Product Improvement interview questions
- How will you improve engagement on LinkedIn?14 answers | 14.2k views
- How would you improve Netflix?12 answers | 27.5k views
- How would you improve Instagram?11 answers | 28.8k views
- See Product Improvement PM Interview Questions