If Google were to enter the gas station business, what would be the product/service that you think Google should build? What would be the MVP for this product/service?

Clarifying Questions :

1. What is our goal we have in mind? We can focus on improving the customer engagement or improving the revenue
2. Is the scope limited to a particular country because the gas stations are very different from state to state and country to country.

Assumptions

1. Focus on customer engagement and specially retention (users come back to the gas station for services)
2. Let's assume that the scope is limited to United states
3. Gas stations located in the prime areas

 I would like to touch upon some of the customer painpoints today:

1. Entering the card details every time, with the growing digital world, people often forget to carry physical cards.
2. Uncertainty around quantity & cost and no understanding on the historic prices
3. Undefined or no estimated wait time in the queue especially when the services are provided at a subsidized rates or discounts

Use cases

Solutions

1. Peak hours and off peak hours displayed as a dynamic Billboard based on the traffic at the station considered for the last few days (we can use a ML algorithm) which helps determine the estimated wait time based on the day and the time of the year
2. Create a mobile app which helps the user to be able to create a login and understand the estimated wait time and schedule an appointment to avoid queue and wait times
3. Identify a frequent user and provide a special walk in for a return user

Amongst the solutions, I like the mobile app which helps the user understand the current estimated wait time and helps schedule an appointment generating a bar code which can be used for a special lane in the gas stations that have appointments

We can have a checkout created within the app itself for the user to be able to go card free when arriving with a pre scheduled appointment

Some of the metrics , I would like to track are :

1. Number of users who downloaded the app and created a user login
2. No.of customers who scheduled an appointment

One risk with the scheduled appointments is, generally customers are used to -  on the go gas stations and the mobile app is a big change and would take time to adapt. There needs to be user awareness on the mobile app through ads.

Scheduled appointments need a special lane which are to be built / marked and can accept the bar code to allow the user so there is an additional infrastructure investment and initial cost involved.

Some Trade off metrics to consider

I would like to understand the users who created the schedule appointment and ended up not creating the appointment to be able to understand the painpoints.

Finally I would like to conclude that we can start with the pre scheduled appointments for the MVP and later build on pre checkout, user analytics (travel spend) , historical prices that will help improve customer satisfaction and retention.