Design a question and answer website like Quora.

Quora description - quora is a web and mobile application that allows users to post any question to the people on the internet, get answers from anyone on the internet. An answer can be upvoted by anyone who is signed up for the service, the author of the question can select the right answer, multiple answers can be posted to the same question, question and answers are moderated

Clarifying questions - 

• Is this only available on the web or should I consider mobile as well?

• Should this be part of gsuite applications?

• can we focus on gsuite US market?

• For initial launch could we target Gsuite largest early adopter customers with lots of users?

• A new product can be launched for many reasons - 

  • New customer acquisition

  • Revenue generation

  • Increase customer engagement

  • Increase value created in a portfolio

Persona - who could this be useful to? - this will be useful to anyone that has questions about anything. We can target two kinds of customers with a product like this. 

1. B2C - a website for the general public that can get questions answered from experts or other public different fields

2. B2B - an internal wiki that is available with gsuite that can help different teams come together, ask questions, and get answered by experts within the company

B2C

• Students asking questions about specific subjects e.g. math, science etc.

• People that have personal problems - e.g. financial, marital, relationships, mental health etc.

• People with legal questions

• Generally curious audience

B2B

• Sales with questions about the products

• Sales with questions about pricing

• Sales with questions about contracts

• Engineers with questions about promotions

• PMs with questions about NPI processes

• PMs with questions about compliance etc.

I would like to focus of B2B market. Since gSuite is replacing traditional office products I think this will help google bring a new product that will act as a company wiki which will help replace traditional products that are made available for free with CRM products. 

Painpoints for sales persona- 

• Unable to get information about a product

• Unable to get questions answered about a customer issue

• Don’t know about new product launches

• Don’t know how a new product fits into the portfolio

• Don’t know the right contacts for a new product

• Have questions about a new pricing model launched

Other personas

• Have a question about the promotion cycle

• Have a question about the new benefit launched

•  

Persona and painpoint -Sales people unable to get answers about the right people at the right time thereby wasting important cycles that could be used to close a deal

Why this persona? - this persona is largely using google products to sell to customers. By targeting this persona, we can take the product to 100s of thousands of users including googles 1000s of sales persona

Solutions

1. Build a web and mobile QA product integrated part of Gsuite

2. Build a separate app integrated with CRM products like peoplesoft, salesforce etc.

3. Build a fully bot operated service that can answer questions for sales persona using AI and ML

Pick option 1 with an aim to introduce features option 3 in the future

I picked Option 1 because it makes sense to build a product that integrates with the current suite of products. This allows the user to get access to documents and spreadsheets from gsuite that can be shared while answering a question

Goal for this product - make all of company data available to sales team so they can make meaningful decisions while closing a deal

Features - 

1. Ability to ask a question

2. Provide multiple responses to a question

3. Upvote downvote a question

4. Search for questions

5. Based on similarities, show already asked questions

6. Allow user to attach docs from gsuite for a particular question

7. Allow questions to have categories

8. Allow user to filter based on categories

9. Allow companies to have moderators\admins

10. Allow access control to documents based on user signed in

11. Allow tagging users from within a company

Features can be prioritized based on reach, impact, confidence and effort. Calculated out of 10

Metrics for solution

Usage Metrics

1. Avg MAU

2. Session length/user 

3. Pinned questions/company

4. Ratio of Number of new questions to search

5. Number of attachments accessed from gsuite

Business Metrics for Google

1. # Customers providing googlQA service to employees

2. # customers replace current CRM based portal for googlQA

3. # customers buying Gsuite because of googlQA

Additional use cases

1. Other usecases that are enabled outside of sales. For e.g. products, eng