You are a Product Manager of CANON (camera manufacturing company), You see your market share decreasing year on year due to higher Mobile phone penetration. How would you increase the revenue and market share of the company?

Clarifying Questions

          [C] Are we focussed on a particular geography?

[I] No, lets go global

          [C] Do we have metrics since when the YoY decrease – 

[I] is it relevant to know

              [C] Yes, as it may know if we did as of now about it something

              [I] We saw a decline and started a revamp on strategy and looking for your inputs

              [C] Thanks for clarification. As phone are product of direct consumer market where camersa work on consumer and business market both.

We can read the problem statement in two parts. Problem 1: We need to improve cameras to increase market. Problem 2: Ensure to let consumer see “Phone cameras not as the alternate to actual camera.”

Problem 2 will also serve subset of problem 1 also, so I will be picking on problem 2.

Product goal – Increase user retention of cameras.

User goal – Enable users to see photographs as the way of living memories

Opportunity – We may say, cameras market decreased but not photography. People go more on vacations and to click photographs so photography market has increased considerably.

Comparative Study

based on the above discussion Interface seem to be root cause of lot of painpoints for carrying the camera. We can solve interface issues with following features

1.       Open OS  - App based OS easily integratable with IOS and android

2.       Instant Sync with social media

3.       AR based pictures which could be modified with background scenery

4.       Picture quality if increased by quality and decreased by storage could another feature. But it would require RnD

5.       Instant printout- A moonshot feature with added sleek portable hardware which could be integrated for instant printouts.

Summarizing

If canon would make picture quality best with added advantage of sync could be entry point of market which can be further leveraged by sturdy design but sleek looks. Last but not the least if canon RnD on easy portable printout machine would be another feature which is not provided by phones but could be built for cameras.

I will treat this as a Product Improvement Question and follow a slightly modified CIRCLES framework

Description

Canon is a camera manufacturing company which manufactures standalone cameras and is well known for its high quality camera build, lenses, photo quality etc. It is often the top choices for people interested in professional photography

Metrics

The metric to improve here is Revenue & Market Share. Revenue can be brokdn down into 2 facotrs- No of Camera Devices & Price of Device. Market Share is generally defined as a factor of No of camera devices

Clarify

- Which geography are we talking about when we consider this problem statement- India

- Are we restricted to the existing models CANON has or can we innovate into new models- Up to you, as long as you can justify

- Is the market share decreasing across all models of CANON or is it more restricted to the lower end models- You can assume what you want

Identify Users

I am considering the following 3 segments of CANON users

U1: The customer who understands the nuances of photography and is interested in the finer details of a photograph. He/she uses a lot of the minute variations -lens type, speed, lighting etc. available in modern cameras and is interested in having a camera that really clicks high quality photographs

U2: The customer who is relatively informed about the nuances of the camera but has never owned a high end camera to experience high quality photography. He/she isnt into professional photos but do take a lot of effort in clicking even causal pictures. They may not be conossiuers but want higher quality photos than their peers and put genuine effort in understanding how to take good pictures

U3: The customer here is more interested in quantity than quality. He/She wants a camera which clicks pictures easily, has a lot of enhancement features like filters, screen sharpeners etc which they can use post clicking a picture, to post good shots on social media

For the purpose of our discussion, I am gonna choose primarily U2, since U1 is probably already a user of CANON, while U3 is not really an immediate target group for the cameras which CANON manufactures

User Journey

A typical U2 user today uses a decent to high quality mobile phone with a good quality camera (30-50k Android/iOS phones). A typical user journey for clicking a picture would look like

Discovery- User sees something interesting (say a very rare flower)

Discovery- Opens his phone, clicks open the camera

Learning- Spends some time in understanding the lighting and other nuances of the photo setup

Taking Picture- Takes a picture, looks at it to check if its of the desired quality

Choice- Clicks a few more till he/she is satsified with the quality

Save- Saves the photo to the device or cloud

Social Media- At a later time, chooses the best picture, and may post it on social media

Social Media-Avoids use of filters as it ruins the genuineness of the picture

Report User Needs

There are 2 ways of looking at the user needs

The first is to say that CANON can find a camera in a price range of 10-20k (discounting from a 30-50k phone price range) and provide a better quality than what the user gets today in his phone. This may be a difficult task because to my knowledge CANON does not even have a camera in that price range

The other way of looking at fulfiling user need or atleast being a part of the user's journey is to be a part of the phone itself. However before that, I would go back to the user journey and find points where the journey has potential problems

Discovery- No user problems

Learning- Given these users may not be as camera savvy as U1, they might have issues in understanding what the finer nuances of good photography is

Choice- How does a user understand that a picture is good or bad? Is there an onjective way of knowing whats the best pic based on scientific parameters?

Save- Photo sizes are large and tend to take up a lot of space on the device or cloud

Social Media- Always a place with a lot of scrutiny, hence user wants to be sure that the picture is of the perfect quality

Prioritise Needs

Based on this, I am going to pick the first 2 user problem areas- Learning how to take the right picture and Choice of the right picture

List Solutions

If you look at both the solutions, you realise that they are both software based solutions, and not the strong suit of CANON which largely specialises in the actual hardware of the camera. Given this, my recommendation would be

"CANON ties up with a major phone manufacurer like Samsung or iphone and creates a mini camera that can be mounted on top of an existing phone camera. CANON is responsible for the actual hardware integration while the software part of the set up is taken care by the phone manufacturer"

The solution also helps move our key north star metric which is no of camera devices. CANON can sell these in collaboration with the manufacturer (the way iphone upsells its earpods), thus potentially selling the same no of camera devices as the actual phones