How would you improve a coffee machine used in offices?

PS: I am going to try and stay away from framework as much as possible.

That's a very interesting problem to a common product used. First off, why are we trying to improve a coffee machine? Are we trying to improve user experience, lower cost for the business, or are we we new company tying to come up with a distruptive machine?

Interviewer: Your pick

Me: Let's say a new company doing something distruptive. Considering that I would assume I would care about something very unique and improving expeirence so that I can get enough customers attracted to it. Being that this company is targeting corporate accounts, I would like to address corporate's concerns. However, corporations alos care about waht their employees might find helpful. Let's dive into this a bit more at somepoint so I know what to try and provide as part of improvement. But first, 1) I have been assuming we are trying to come up with a hardware product. But is that correct? 2)Can we focsu on just US since I am more familiar with the US market?

interviewer: hard/soft upto you.

Me: Let's focus on maybe hard/soft both. Idk yet. Let's first think of what the needs might be and we can then figure out if it should be hard/soft or both. Approach I want to take is think about who my target audiance should be so that can think of what might help that auidance. That will help me solution this and maybe we comeup with an Mvp as we try to build this.

Interviewer: Sure

Me: As I said before even though it's coporate that we are aiming at they ultimately care about their employees. From employee perspective it's the experience that matters but from company perspective it's also the cost of operations. I think I would like to keep both in mind coz we have a dual customer here we need to keep happy.

Interviewer: Sure.

Me: Ideally I would conduct a user research by maybe talking to companies and their employees about their experience and frustrations, observe employees during peak times, mabye take a few vidoes /pictures to later analyze the emotions that jump from these, perform some other research using published material, etc. But do you happen to have any such research?

Interviewer: No. You are the PM.

Me: Based on above research, from a company perspective they would like to reduce cost overall and keep employees more focused on work and coffee machines seem to be a time waster. sounds like a conservation company to me. But employees seem to be be tired of the same old taste and wish they could get better selection of coffee.

I think both high levle problems are important to address so let's see what I may improve.

1)Corporates have ot store cups and those end up getting wasted sometimes coz employees don't use the right cups. My coffee machine could store the cups and based on the size selection auto release an appropriate sized cup.

2)If I can provide a software via which employees can order the coffee that might be good idea. Employees don't have to get to coffee machine during peak hours and wait their turn but can pre-order, even schedule a time and be notified when coffee is done to then go to the spot. That means coffee machine needs to have an attachment that can hold x coffee cups. This means the space has to be big to store the track that holds coffee cups ready with coffee. Mayne this should be customizable and then you could program within coffee machine how many cups should it allow to be filled at a time. When a cup is picked up, the sensor releases a space for coffee maker to make another coffee.

3)If employees are interested in coffee available at office, they wouldn't actually drive off to starbucks druing office hours. So maybe the coffee marker company should also provide equivalent new flavors of coffee that starbucks come out with. Most starbucks new flavors though also have the same base coffee that's used but just made differently. So maybe there needs to be more programs and settings nad recipes that can be published online to the server for coffee machine to have additional recipes (seasonal or not).

4)Coffee machine asks how the coffee was and the emeloyee can input what modifications were made after the coffee was made. Or user can infact select how much cream to add, etc. on a sliding scale. The machine learns about the user. Maybe next time wheu you make a coffee that's different, it can ask "Vishal last time you made something as bitter as this one, you used a 1/2 pack of equal. This one is about 25% less bitter than the last one. Would you like me to add appropriate proportion of sugar to it?". It could also keep track of "your 3 closest friend at work has these 3 top choices that you don't seem to have ever tried. Want to try one of those and tell your friend you tried it?" Issue with this approach surely is about would people feel comfortable sharing waht they drink but this I highly doubt + you can incorporate opt-in/out features. I also doubt how many variations people make to coffee usually.

I like all the ideas actually but I doubt #1 is truly a concern in the office for the company. I do like the idea of being able to put in your coffee order but I am not sure about cofee machine making hte order when you aren't present since this poses concerns around queue to be created of physical coffee cups withh coffee made, etc. There are too many infrasturcture related issues with this which to me seems like kinda crazy. While #3 sounds great "hey I can get that new strawberry coffee" that Starvucks has now at the office but in all reality I think our company prob wants to focus more on coffee machine vs ancelliary products (this would be a very diff business all together). So #4 I think is best considering employees like to gather around coffee machines since it gives than a chance / excuse for some socialization + I think it benefits the company since it provides network around the office and helps build relationships whchi results in better morale and loyality for the company. I do think that we should also enable an app whereby person should be able to pre-order and merely scan a QR code at the machine so it's quick and easy. In fact, I think your friends at work or anywhere can also suggest a coffee combination you should try. You can now have customized coffee if you don't want to go with traditioal recipes. I think this would surely be a a driver for business to order these machines.

I would start with what was stated in #4 as an MVP and expand in future with additional software options I talked about.

To launch I think I would start with select few offices with young vibrant culture (since a digitized machne is more likely to be used by this age group) and may even choose a non-vibrant comapny for co-testing as well. I would also setup more of a A/B testing whereby the traditional coffee machine would sit next to our new product and measure of # of user sessions on new machine are goign up or not .

OVerall though, to meausre success once lunched, I would like to measure after QTR of launch 1) # of net new customers 2)I would have measured % of subscription renewals if we had implemente a subscription based biz. If I think about it I think I could have a revolutionary idea on this. 3)For user experience, I think it be best to measure NPS. 4)I would have stated observing users use it but that would be more of a prototype and usability testing of it.

I would now conclude with summarizing approach, telling the interviewer of MVP solution.

Assumptions :

I assume the coffee machine that we are talking about is a regular machine(I'll refer to the one that I use) in which the user can choose which type of coffee he wants and it gets dispensed.
What do you mean by improvement? Let me assume we want to add new users to the machine and increase engagement for the ones who are using it.

User groups : Let me group users by the usage : 

1. High usage: These are the people who drink 3-4 cups of coffee per day.
2. Moderate usage: They drink 1 coffee per day.
3. Low usage: They never used the machine or drink 1-2 coffee per week on average.

1. They don't know how the machine works so they never actually tried getting coffee from it.
2. People who don't like coffee.
3. Sometimes the queue for coffee is too long so don't want to wait to get coffee.
4. Don't know which coffee to drink out of all options and don't want to experiment.
5. The coffee that gets dispensed is of fixed quantity so users with big mugs have to perform the same operation multiple times.

1. When the machine is not being used or is in standby mode we can show steps on the screen as a screen saver, this will reduce the hesitation for a new user about using the machine for the first time. (Not much effort is required and is of high user value)
2. For people who don't like coffee, we can add alternate options like tea or hot milk/water and provide additional sachets to use with it. (High effort required and is of high customer value).
3. We can make an app and integrate it with our coffee machine, we can add features like showing coffee machines which are not being used, personalized user experience of each user with their preferences set in the machine, they can put their order in the app and just put a code in the machine to get their order instead of setting their choice in the machine. (Very high effort and engineering required and  moderate customer value)
4. On the screen of machine, we can suggest coffees which are ordered the most number of times, making it easy for people to make a choice. (Not much effort and moderate customer value)
5. We can add an additional option on the machine which allows people to select quantity(small, medium, large) and temperature of the coffee, improving user experience and satisfaction. (High effort required and high customer value).