How would you improve Google Home?

Great question - In order to work through this problem, I would like to understand our goals and constraints and then think about our users and their core use cases, prioritize the use cases and then brainstorm some solutions to address those use cases.

Clarifications:

1. When we say Google Home - we’re talking about the physical Google speaker that has the Google Assistant built-in, right? And that includes the Home hub max and the mini as well, right?

2. What are the main goals of the improvement? Is it to increase engagement, new market entry, increase unit sales of the devices, any other goals?

3. Any specific market we’re aiming at?

4. What constraints are we working with?

Now, just to make sure my understanding of the product is correct:

1. Google Home is a physical device with built in Google Assistant - that can be signed into using a user’s existing Google account and that can be used to interact with Google in a natural language way to get questions answered, command the device to do certain tasks, or use it to control other connected devices in the user’s home. If it’s okay, I would like to focus on the Google Home Hub Max - the one with the screen as I feel there are several ways we can think about to improve engagement on that.

Let me take a minute to think about various different user personas that interact with Google Home

User Personas:

1. Kids under 17

2. Parents

3. Young and busy professionals

4. Elderly

In order to choose which persona to focus on, I would look at two main parameters:

1. Total potential user base

   1. Kids under 17 - globally is about 26% of the population: that gives us a potential user base of 1.9B users

2. Possibility of a Platform/Ecosystem play

   1. One common focus area for kids under 17 globally is education - and education is a sector that has schools, teachers, kids, parents, book publishers, and school supply manufacturers - all forming a ecosystem so building an education platform is a good strategic choice that is valuable for users as well as Google.

Kids under 17 and their education needs:

1. Personalized learning

2. Keeping track of school homework and getting help completing it

3. Collaborating with other students to complete school project work

4. Help with standardized tests

I think problems 2 and 4 cannot really be effectively solved without solving problem 1 - so that becomes the key focus area - furthermore, problem 3 seems to be a relatively easy fix via the Google Home - so we can think about that as a new feature development for Google Home.

So, our main user need to solve for is Personalized Learning - and I would like to next spend some time brainstorming solutions for that. And because our goal is to increase engagement, I would like to think about ways to make the product sticky for users.

Personalized Learning - core solutions:

1. Learner profile - build a rich learner profile that gives G home a deeper understanding of the students strengths, skills, needs, motivations, and goals

2. Build a personalized learning path for each student - and bring in rewards for successfully making progress on the learning path

3. Competency based learning - basically, a testing mechanism that does not purely test hard skills on a test but also tracks development of core skills and designs tests to measure competency

4. Adaptive learning environment - changing the physical environment (mood lighting, concentration music, etc.) tailored to user's needs

5. Collaborative / group learning - be able to exchange notes and ideas with friends when working on a project

Personalized Learning - Peripheral solutions:

1. Payments for classes

2. Online ordering for school supplies

3. Progress report sharing and acknowledgement by parents

4. Parent - teacher regular check ins

User Need: P13N Learning

Recommendation: 

Based on my analysis - I would recommend building an MVP focused on building a rich learner profile over time that can be used to build personalized learning paths for each student. I will also top off the MVP with the peripheral features I identified because that helps with adoption of the product and also increases engagement from parents and teachers and therefore - creates a ecosystem around children’s education

Success Metrics:

1. Engagement:

   1. # of new users signed up

   2. # of users dropping classes and learning paths and at what points

   3. # of users completing all classes and learning paths

   4. Adoption across teachers

   5. # of new home hub devices sold

2. User Satisfaction

   1. NPS

   2. CSAT

Go to Market: In terms of launching this product, I would like to pilot this in a tech savvy large city in India - example; Bangalore: Gather data from the pilot launch and then roll out to other tech friendly cities such as Hyderabad, Pune, Bombay, Delhi, etc.

I want to choose India because of three main reasons:

1. Hyper focused culture on kids’ education

2. Diversity in the school system - an opportunity to truly build an intelligent personalized teacher for kids

3. Building for India can help building for other geographies much easier

Great question. Google home is a hardware device, enabling hands-free access to your Google Assistant for activities such as music, answers, and schedule. In terms of improvements, I’d like to clarify if the challenge is directed towards user engagement or to revenue growth (A: There is no current problem w Google Home. Either would be beneficial to the company). Perfect, user engagement provides an opportunity to support both outcomes so I will focus there.

I see a few intended use cases: Google Assistant related to boosting productivity and enabling seamless experiences at home, as well as workplace management. Let’s look at each:

Home: Boost Productivity
Pain points – hands-full, may be communicating with children for 8-10 hours a day, needing solutions as problems come up, and… how about solving problems before they happen.
Solutions – Low-touch triggering, intelligent voice with a feeling that this is legitimately engaging, seamless product ordering, access to experts, predictive hardware product extensions.

Home: Enabling Relaxing
Pain Points – taxing to setup my settings each time, I’m locked to Google’s ecosystem which lacks depth of obscure.
Solution – Introduce modes to systems for presets to lighting, temperature, and music. Reading mode, chill mode, sleep mode, party mode.

Office: Managing Personalities in a Collective
Pain points – Multiple voices trying to engage the home. “Google” as a word does not have the most distinctive syllables to trigger. The Home is generic in an office setting, relagated to office DJ if applicable or an office away from people. Solve problems as they arise and even before they arise. Prevent stock-outs of office supplies or even production.
Solutions – Introduce individual voice recognition. Allow presets similar to above for each person. Allow integration so Google to check group schedules and personal attendee schedules to find optimum time to sync up – eliminating the back and forth. Introduce a scalable marketplace relationship for ordering to compete with Amazon – Dash, Alexa.

Implementation
Looking at the Home’s current offering, it is geared to providing a seamless and tailored experience at-home. Looking deeper at the needs of users, going a layer deeper to solving unpleasant home challenges such as creating lists and shopping for commodity items is a pain that Google is currently not serving, but the competition is. Creating a scalable marketplace focusing on a limited selection of home consumables (bulky, heavy items – toilet paper, soda), fufilled by a local grocery store would be a good start.

One angle currently open in the productivity space, is the hands-free platform provides a low-touch avenue to experts by voice, but elminates the yellow pages/ google lookup – think – ah, my garborator isn’t working and my kitchen stinks, is it the power or the or the or the. A partnership with thumb-tack or creating an expert marketplace from google review (we have the phone number) would be a a competitive advantage.

Finally, supporting all markets is the idea of personalization of experiences. Introducting voice reognition and account syncing to multiple users, would help streamline office meetings, DJ, at-home presets, and ordering accounts for at-home productivity.

I would look to create a competitive advantage with expert services to build on data already on the platform and have my M&A team look at partnership creation with a local fufilment center to get heavy, bulky items to users quickly.

Structure

1. Clarify what Google Home is
2. What are we improving?
3. Who are we improving it for? (segment users and what is criteria for choosing users)
4. Use Cases for this segment (what do they need google home for today?)
5. Problems
6. Solutions

What is Google Home?
Is this just the speaker/microphone device or Google Assistant? I’m going to assume both.

What are we improving?

1. Market share / acquisition
2. Engagement
3. Retention
4. Revenue
5. Referral

I’ll choose engagement + retention because that will drive market share and revenue. And this way of interaction is so new that we can probably come up with high impact ways to make it more engaging and solve interesting problems

Who?

1. Children
2. College Students
3. Toddlers (1-5 years old)
4. Teachers
5. Parents
6. Young Professionals

Selection Criteria is reach (# of people), current market penetration, market growth potential
I chose Teachers because that’s a big market that’s growing with low market penetration in the classroom by the Google Home. There’s additional benefit of exposing the Google Home to students /parents that could eventually extend to the home.

Use Cases

1. teachers explain subjects (like dinosaurs)
2. teachers help define words
3. teachers help work thru math problems
4. teachers keep order and calm in class
5. teachers set timers and keep the curriculum moving
6. teachers reward students
7. teachers create lesson plans and share them
8. teachers administer tests / homework
9. teachers grade tests / homework

Summary:

1. teachers teach
2. teachers administer lessons / tests / homework
3. teachers keep the order with structure and rewards

Problems

1. Lesson plans are difficult to put together. It’s hard to tie a specific class to a lesson plan
2. Teachers don’t know every subject or word or math problem being asked
3. Rewarding students can be difficult especially with limited budgets (and incentives alignment)
4. A google home does not keep the order in the classroom well. Kids might abuse it
5. Some subjects are better described with visualizations including things like math
6. A Google home can’t recognize 30 voices in a classroom
7. A Google home can’t give permission to speak or know who has permission to speak to it
8. A Google home can’t talk to an individual – it talks to a room
9. A Google home doesn’t know how to administer tests
10. A Google home doesn’t know how to adjust answers to a specific age-appropriate level

Solutions

1. An age setting on Google home to vary age-appropriate answers
2. Ear pieces for individual conversation with the Google Home
3. A projector that works with the Google home. Better yet, an integration with a 3D hologram / or VR headset
4. A google home that can identify 30 voices and know which voices has permission to speak to it
5. Only the teacher can talk to the Google home
6. A teacher can load up quizzes to teh Google Home and it can administer verbal tests
7. A google home can be taken home by a child to train it on a subject for show and tell

Prioritizing Solutions
Criteria: Reach, Impact, Cost, Confidence Level
I’ll try to do something with voice permissions for 30 children and then integration with VR headset.
Rollout: success metric will be if teachers use the Google Home as part of their lessons on a weekly basis. How many questions per day can it answer? Start with just a few classrooms and expand if it hits those metrics