What should you build to improve productivity when working from home?

Assumption - We do not have any other productivity tool, so initially for us the primary goal is to launch a MVP, market penetration, acquiring more users etc.

User Segments - 

1. Sales Folks, agents(Mostly Calls and Text, less screen time etc)

2. Tech Employees(Meetings, Computers and more screen time etc)

3. Trainers, Teachers(Online Training, Videos etc)

I would like to focus on Tech Employees. First, the size of this segment is bigger compared to the other 2. Tech industry employees spend most of their time in front of their computers working , meeting etc and have a majority of pain points related to WFH.

Pain Points - 

1. Less Mobility(No commute, walk etc)

2. Less motivation to stay fit and look good (Social life)

3. No Routine (Since they can just slouch on the couch and take meetings or take meeting from the bed)

4. Distractions(Physical communication missing, majority of communication happens on slack, email, meeting etc) as a result employees don't get time to do creative or focus work and it impacts productivity

I would focus on the Distraction, I believe it's a major pain point when we think about employee productivity. Other pain points are still manageable by the employees but this pain point depends on a lot of external factors.

Solutions

I will build an App with the below features. Since we can build an App quickly to go to market and test the product.

1. Analytics tool

   1. Sends me Daily, weekly, month Analytics charts, reports, how I have spent my time.

   2. Forecast and Recommendations

   3. Subscription to email, sms, push etc

2. Community

   1. FAQs

   2. Success Stories of companies, individuals etc mostly UGC(Engagement, like share etc)

   3. Tips

3. Challenges and Rewards(Programs)

   1. Teams can sign up and choose programs like (3 hrs of creative work, no slack, no emails for a day etc), enter their data and how they did, engage with each other. Best Team or Individuals in the company wins badges, gift cards, coupons etc

4. Integration with calendar, slack, email etc, blocks your calendar daily for creative work (Allow certain stakeholders who can book). Its )like a sleep mode on the iphone, you don't get any emails, chats during that time. 

Tradeoff and Prioritization

MVP

Solution 1 - is a low effort and high impact , its a quick win and I would like to build it.

Solution 2.a and 2.c - Building a Community is a high effort and high impact solution, maybe I will skip this for my MVP but I would like to have an information gallery with resources(articles, blogs etc) on productivity collected from the internet and shared in a single page. It also contains tips and recommendations.

Solution 3.a and 3.b - Designing Programs for Individuals and Teams is a low effort and high impact feature. The tradeoff here is we have to hire professionals who can design programs for us or partner with third party companies. 

Solution 4 - The tradeoff here is, at times certain jobs expect employees to check email immediately  or respond to slack, so some companies or individuals might not like this feature. We need to do further market research and collect more data to validate our understanding.

Success Metrics -

Acquisition and Activation Metrics

1. No of app downloads

2. No. of Signups

3. No. of Profile Activation

Usage Metrics

1. Analytics Tool Subscription Enabled

2. CTR from emails, push notifications etc

3. CTR on Information Blogs

4. No of Individual/Team, SIgnups for Programs and challenges.

5. Amount of data entered for programs

Health Metrics

1. Load time

2. Data Loss 

3. App Crashes

4. Error Messages

With that being said, my north star metrics here will be my user acquisition and activation metrics.

Summary

So to improve productivity, I will build an App which collects data from users(integration with other tools), prepare summarized reports, recommendations and shares/sends it to users. Also I would create programs that individuals and teams can sign up. Last but not the least I will have an information gallery which will have important articles and resources on productivity. My north star metrics will be related to user acquisition and activation.