You are the PM of a Media Company. Your CEO ask you to create an app for the company's newspaper. What would you do?

Things you did well

1.       User profiles are fine.

2.       Pick a profile based on criteria – you picked the elderly because they are the most likely to consume the news via newspaper.  It’s fine – but not the typical 1st demographic for a web / app based product. 

3.       Pain points – you did a fine job outlining the pain points of your chosen demographics. 

Things to Improve

1.        Clarifying questions – I think a few more would be OK

a.       Is our newspaper regional, national, international? In your solution you keep talking about multiple local newspapers – this is an assumption – you never asked that question. 

b.       Why do we need an app now?

c.       What happens if we do nothing?

d.       I would try to dig in a bit more – if you keep getting you decide then move on.

2.       Pick a pain point based on criteria – you pick three pain points I would expect to see solutions for each.  You do – but as the interviewer I have to piece together which solution goes with which pain point.  I recommend that you just pick one pain point to focus on.

3.       Solution – I recommend 3-4 solutions with one being a moon shot.  Most of your solutions feel like features

a.       Location based permissions to so local content – feel like this exists

b.       Assistant button to pick a newspaper

c.       Change font size – I’ve done that already in on my phone – this exists

d.       Covert the news in video format – tell me more – are we going to produce all content in video.  Is this an automated transcription service.  The most exciting idea in the list and you don’t do anything with it. 

e.       Yesterday’s news gets converted to PDF – why not just leave it on the app and let the user scroll back a day? Why convert to the PDF?

4.       Pick a solution based on criteria – rank every solution using reach, impact, effort (check out an article on RICE prioritization).  If you were at the solution level instead of features then it makes sense to just pick one solution. 

5.       Metrics – your metrics fell a bit soft to me especially the engagement metrics where you simply maybe

a.       Number of articles per session

b.       Number of sessions per time period Day, Month, Year

c.       DAU, WAU, MAU, plus ratios

d.       Average time per article

e.       Total time on app per session

Things to Think About

1.       Goals are typically linked in Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Revenue, Referral.  Check out articles on AAARRR, plus engagement