Design a product for teenagers to have more empathy.

My thoughts on how to approach this product design question.

Clarify - Can you please elaborate more on Empathy ? Why are we trying to build this product ? What is the Business Objective ? 

Teenagers are the future and these days with technology, social media etc they are too engrossed in their own life or circle and lack empathy.

Objective - 

Google’s mission is to Organize the world's information. It's important for Teenagers tto get the right information they need in order to better understand the world, society for them to be successful and future leaders. Also this is an untapped market, not many products around.

Assumption - 

Build a product that can be used both by parents and students. Launch it globally. The product could be a software or hardware product. For now we will focus on the software aspect of it. We will follow the standard google approach where it's a separate app(like Maps, email etc) but the feature will be part of google.com. For now I will just focus on the App.

Use Cases

1. Empathy towards Parents and Siblings

2. Empathy towards Social Causes

3. Empathy towards outside world(ex - Friends)

I will pick the 1st use case because I think there are not many tools, products to help with empathising towards Family members and siblings. There is a lot of information around social causes, sometimes these are part of curriculum, news channels, social media etc. It will have the highest impact on my customer segment because Parents who are decision makers at that age will be interested in this product.

Pain Points 

1. Lack of motivations - Teenagers are motivated to do study, do their homework etc but not to spend more time with Family members , siblings and connect with them

2. Lack of time - Busy Lifestyle with school, home work  (less time) to interact with Friends and Families and connect emotionally.

3. Discovering the right information - Internet and social media is full of negative news. Teenagers need to be exposed to more positive news (feel good news) that will shape their thought process.

I would focus on pain point #1 and #3. I think teenagers should be motivated to bond with family members and need to be aware of more positive news on the internet in order to have more empathy. 

Solutions

I am planning to build an App.  The App will contain the below features - 

1. Stories on Successful people 

   1. People(Influential Leaders) to Follow

   2. Recommended Stories(Short Success Stories on world leaders like Nelson Mandela, MLK, Gandhi etc.)

   3. Snippets or Quotes (Daily Notifications email, push, sms etc)

2. Share a story(Social Tool)

   1. Friends Share their struggle and success story, option to like , comment , share and engage.

   2. Run competitions to encourage teenagers to spend time with family members and post pictures (like helping dad in gardening, mom with dishes etc)

3. Recommendation 

   1. Recommendation to families to do things together like participate in local charity, help at local shelter etc.

4. Information blog

   1. Important Informations and Resources for both parents and teenagers, Interesting articles of mental health, happiness, well being etc

Tradeoffs and Prioritization 

Solution 1 - Medium Effort High Impact. It will take some execution and planning to collect contents from the internet and Curate/Organize them. I would make this solution part of my MVP. Tradeoff is there could be copyright issues. 

Solution 2 - It will take more effort to build the social media solution. It needs significant investment(time and resources) to build this platform, hence this will be a low priority feature for me and I will keep it in my road map for long term.

Solution 3 - Recommendation Events (based on location, interests etc). Medium Effort and High Impact feature to build the recommendation Algorithm. Will build it as part of the MVP.

Solution 4 - Low Effort and High Impact Feature. Will build it as part of the MVP. Tradeoff here is execution and partnership with other websites and companies for interesting resources and articles. 

Success Metrics 

Acquisition

• No of Downloads

• No. of SIgnups

Activation

1. No of Profile Activations

2. DAU(7 Days)

3. DAU(30 Days)

Engagement

1. # of Impressions

2. CTR

3. No. of sessions/day

4. No of Pages/session etc

Satisfaction Metrics

1. CSAT and NPS Scores

North Star Metrics

• No. of Downloads/SIgnups/Activation

• CSAT and NPS Scores