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You are a new PM at Google. Design a wearable for children.

Asked at Google
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  • Clarification -
    • Children age group is 5-19?
    • Is there a price range we are looking at? Maximum device price of <= 200$ - Children so they don’t want to get expensive stuff as that might get more unwanted attention
    • Only wearable or does it have another device to be paired? Single device only
    • Geos: US/Europe
    • Goal: Adoption, selling units at the beginning
  • There are multiple wearable devices - glasses, watches, bands.
    • Glasses are obtrusive and children might not want to wear it as it might hamper with their play activities
    • Watches and Bands are less obtrusive
  • There are a few pain points and use cases I can think of when I imagine of kids and wearables
    • Children lose it by keeping at different places
    • Hesitancy to wear it and might keep it off somewhere and wear when parents are near
    • Might forget to charge
    • Other pain points I can think of can be bucketed into
      • Safety
        • Children can wander away and get lost
        • Strangers can come and talk
        • Might get anxious when in different surroundings
      • Eating habits - allergy
        • Might be more prone to eating junk
        • Might eat something they are allergic to
      • Study Habits
        • Might get too engrossed in playing

 

  • Foundational elements of the Solutions:

Giving a high level view of the foundational elements and then going to prioritize based on the adoption criteria vs effort involved vs cost.

There is also a software component to the wearable device that stores all the data that the wearable collects in the cloud.

Ability to make calls to certain numbers - 911, parents phone from the device.

Lack of Bluetooth to save costs - all data uploaded to cloud and an app to view the data.

A mobile transceiver and data connection with a SP

  • Solutions for the pain points and effort involved
    • Tracking for the device - An app that can trigger ringtones from the cloud on the phone. Effort - Low, Impact - Low to medium, Cost involved - Low. Must have for adoption initially - good to have
    • Hesitancy to wear - Make it fun - cases and designs targeting the contemporary things in the world at that. Effort - Can be in house or partnerships. At the beginning in house and then partnership for wider options. Costs - Manufacturing costs incremental, can also be priced at a higher premium. Effort - Low, No S/W effort. Adoption - Medium to high. Must have for adoption
    • Might forget to charge - For initial release just a beeper at parents device. Later can incorporate solar/heat charging etc. Effort - Low, Not an Important feature to have for first release
    • Safety
      • Panic button - Call to 911, parents phone. Must have. Automatically sends location data, nearby picture and video information.
      • Location - GPS to send periodic location coordinates. Must Have
      • In build camera in the device to take a 360 degree view video and picture. Cost of a 360 degree camera is 40$ (based on a startup I worked on). Feature - Must have, Effort - S/W costs, mostly open source audio/video encoding, processing costs low as in cloud.
        • First release - Manually turning on via parents device or by the child.
        • Next releases - Can be auto recording based on new sounds, people, panic (heartbeat), pulse rate
    • Eating:
      • Camera can be used to identify allergy contents and ability to input allergy items into the app - Effort - Medium. Good to have
      • Calorie counter/Junk eating counter
    • Study reminder:
      • Ability to input school schedules and homework in the cloud. Effort - Low, Impact - High. To actual buyer Parents, after the first release
      • Tracks # of hours played outside, video games and calculates the hours studied etc. Effort Low as most is data collection through the device sensors , Impact - High to actual buyer - parents after first release
  • Metrics:
    • Awareness - Pre launch efforts
      • # of organic searches
      • Site visits
      • Based on advertising medium - # of impressions
    • Acquisition
      • # of purchases over a period of 30 days
      • # of app downloads
    • Engagement
      • # of profile creations
      • # of cloud account setups
      • Recharge % amongst users - how many of them recharge regularly.
      • Usage past the first 30 days - first 30 days generally show higher engagement because of the new toy phenomenon. Continued usage to be tracked
      • Customer reviews, feedback
  • Not focusing on the referral/revenue during the first phase

Summary

 

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Questions to Clarify and narrow the scope

Age group you are looking at? You can decide

Any specific kind of wearable you are looking at? Glasses, Watch, other kind of devices? Anything

Any budget constraints? No

Any specific market you are looking to target?  US, UK, Europe. 

Business Goal 

To sell as many wearables as possible and increase adoption. 

Users 

Kids- age group (below 7) 

Kids - age group (7-13) 

Teens - age group (13-18)

Parents 

Teachers

Chosen User Segment

I would pick teens as chosen user segment since kids in this age group are more outgoing and also equally vulnerable. Also this is an age group which also needs to take care of fitness the most else they can grow up to become over-weight and have several health issues. 

Use Cases

  1. Children should be able to make payments when they spend outside.
  2. Children want to stay fit so all the activity should be tracked using the wearable. Important 
  3. Children should continue to eat healthy.
  4. Children should stay safe and away from any danger.
  5.  Children should be able to navigate easily.
  6. Children should be able to get entertained.
Priority
4>2>3>1>5>6
 
Solutions 
  • Wearable band or watch can be thought of as a solution. 
Possible Solutions
  1. Panic button to immediately send a SOS to parents as well as nearby police station in case child is in any kind of danger.  
  2. Live Location accessible to parents via the app. 
  3. Automatically notify parents when child enters a dangerous neighbourhood or near some place where some unforeseen dangerous event is taking place. eg. shootout or any kind of criminal activity. 
  4. Send automatic notification to parents when child is breaching the safe speed limit. 
  5. Small Camera in the watch to take a picture of the food that child is eating which will automatically calculate the number of calories and log in the device. 
  6. NFC enabled device to support payments via Apple Pay or Google Pay. Tie up with Apple or Google to provide a Wallet kind of experience which can be preloaded by parents. 
  7. Based on vitals and food intake, set up customized goals at user level to motivate teens to carry out physical activity to stay healthy. Use influencer references.
  8. Tie up with retail stores such as Walmart, Kroger, Macy's, Costco etc. to create a fast checkout experience. Users can bring the item near the device, it gets added to virtual cart and finally when the user leaves the store, charges are deducted from the wallet. 
Long term, we can extend it to add glasses and use AR and VR to support entertainment - news, videos, music + navigation + gaming use cases in a better manner. 
 
Trade-Offs
 
Some solutions such as live location are invading the privacy of teens and teens may not like them. Panic button as well as automatic notification is a good idea though. 
Tying up with Walmart and others to create a fast checkout experience would require extensive research and expensive. 
 
Based on impact vs effort, i will have 1, 3, 4, 5, 6,7 in the MVP. 
 
Metrics
 
Number of devices sold
NPS
Payments made via device
Accidents avoided
% of fitness goals met by teens
 
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Areas you did well

1.       Great use of framework to the interviewer though process

2.       You hit every step and do it well

Areas of improvement

1.       I’d like to see you use some framework for evaluating the solutions

a.       RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or Effort, Impact, Fit to Goal or Company, etc.

2.       Metrics

a.       I’d like to see some metrics about engagement with the wearable on a daily basis.  Imagine you launch the product and they don’t sell.  Metrics about how the user uses the wearable on a daily basis might help you identify fixes etc. 

 

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