Your Favourite Product is…? Suggest possible improvements in the product!
The MOST Commonly asked Product Management Interview Question
In one of my product management live courses (YouTube link), I found insightful answers to this commonly asked PM interview question (what is your favourite product) and thought of sharing it with the larger community.
An ideal answer looks like this (my version of answering this question) —
I’ve listed down insightful answers to this question below. This will for sure broaden your perspective and help you build a Product Mindset which is a key skill in every product management interview as well as for the job itself.
Which is your favourite product? Why is this product your favourite? Suggest Possible Improvements in this product.
My favorite product at this moment of time is Reddit. Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Reddit is a network of communities where people can deep dive as per their interests.
Why is it my favourite product?
1. Multi-Level threaded comments allowing interesting discussions and they are easy to follow for others.
2. Subreddits are the closely-knit communities of like-minded people. Due to this, one can access specific content in a more organized way and also have
discussion with people having similar interests.
3. Most popular upvoting microblogging platform.Some possible improvements are:
1. Allowing anonymous posting but this option should be only available to registered accounts.
2. An introductory guide should be sent to every new user telling them how to use Reddit. Most users do not even know simplest of things.
3. A decentralized mod system. Power should be distributed. This will make sure that Reddit is not going on the path of other social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc.— Aryan Prajapati (2020meb1270@iitrpr.ac.in)
Google Pay is my favorite product.
It is my favorite product because:
1. Simple onboarding: creating an account takes less than a minute because Google already knows who I am.
2. It works with all payment terminals, whereas other wallets function with a limited number of payment terminals.
3. All-in-one (loyalty, boarding passes, tickets, credit cards, loyalty cards), and most shops support it.Possible Improvements:
1. Improve payment success rate: When using Google Pay, we occasionally encounter problems and payments are unsuccessful. We should work around it in order to get a near-perfect success rate.
2. Integrations with split billing systems like Splitwise — settling splitwise accounts using Google Pay is a smart idea since it will make bill settlements simple, convenient, and quick.
— Kunal Malhotra (2020eeb1181@iitrpr.ac.in)
My favorite product is Duolingo, a language learning application. I have always been a language enthusiast. I discovered this app during the pandemic, when I was confined to my home. The app offers courses in many languages including African and Native American languages; I laud this as an act of cultural promotion.
One of its traits is that it uses game like interface for language learning where user is required to choose the correct word or sentence or is required to repeat it. The app has interesting cartoon characters that interact with the user while learning. It has short slices of each module, each of less than 5 minutes, so I can use this app even now when I have a busy schedule, by sparing 5 minutes of time and making small progress each time. Each slice gives the user 20XP + bonus up to 5XP for good performance.
There are also competitions spanning a few days during which the top players who earn most XP win. This creates a sense of competition among users, facilitating their learning process and it also provides platform to meet new people. Hence in my view, the app’s reward mechanism is innovative.
Possible Improvements:
1) It offers 90% of its foreign language courses in English and not in other languages like Hindi, since users will always like to learn another language through their native language. So the content developers can work on offering more courses through different languages like Hindi, Arabic and Chinese which have large native speaker populations. For instance, French or German language course is not available in Hindi medium.
2) The course, though user friendly, seems to be very slow for a person of normal language learning ability, thus the course needs to be a bit faster to avoid boredom and ultimately withdrawal among users.
3) The course outline was not given and feedback mechanism was lacking. Since the adage goes as ‘That which can be measured can be improved’. So the user can only improve his fluency in a particular language only if she receives consistent feedback and remedies. I consider the implementation of this solution as a must for Duolingo if it wants to improve user satisfaction— HITESH SAI (2021meb1288@iitrpr.ac.in)
Google Photos is my favourite product.
“Google Photos lets you store, share, view, and edit photos and videos, and includes an AI-powered assistant to help manage your media. It also allows you to create albums and search photos using advanced filters. It works for both Android and iOS devices. ‘’
Why do I like Google Photos?
Usefulness: It is easy to store and retrieve my photos.
Efficient: Quick editing and quick sharing
Innovation: Automatic face tagging helps me retrieve images quickly.
Other: It has many features like editing, making collage, frames and you can also add your another account with your account in case your storage is full which is very safe, secure and useful.
Possible improvements for Google Photos:
Google Photos has a very big market share in photo storage. All android phones have Google Photos preinstalled in them. Once users start backing up their photos to Google, they rarely stop using it. This clearly signifies that acquisition and retention metrics need not be our goal.Thinking more from a professional photographers perspective, I’ve listed down all the pain points and their solutions by going through their user-flow.
1. Duplicate/similar photos cleaning: To get that perfect shot, the photographer would take multiple photos for the same moment. This needs dedicated effort to clean and find the perfect image out of the pile. Google photos can give a feature of filtering out the best photo out of a batch of similar photos by analysing the images with algorithms and AI.
2. Grouping images: Taking event photoshoot as an example, photographers would be clicking images at multiple locations as well as at different times. Now, grouping the images on the basis of location or time requires a significant amount of time. Google photos can include a feature of auto-grouping of images by reading their meta-data (called EXIF data of an image). This will reduce the workload significantly.
3. Custom watermark: Photos are the intellectual property of the photographer. It is important that these photos are not used by someone else without copyright. Google photos can introduce a feature of adding custom watermark on the photos. Currently, photographers use 3rd party apps to add watermarks.
— Nikita Kumari (2020meb1296@iitrpr.ac.in)
Brave browser is my favourite product.
It is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which automatically blocks online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.
It also provides users the choice to turn on optional ads that pay users for their attention in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) cryptocurrency. Users can then send contributions to websites and content creators, which support BAT in the form of tips along with the ability to keep the cryptocurrency they earned.
I personally use brave because of the following reasons:
1) Brave blocks scripts
2) Brave provides per website settings - to use shields or not to use them
3) Importantly it is add free, we can browse any website, youtube without any adds or any popups
4) Brave also gives rewards in the form of adds where we can earn some money by watching adds.
5) Brave wallet is an Ethereum-based crypto wallet built directly into the desktop browser itself where we can manage the crypto assets.
6) Brave has a tor connectivity.
People mainly use Brave for its unparalleled privacy and security, and also for time saving as they don’t need to watch any add or fight with popup.Possible Improvements:
1) Brave needs to have a flexbox/Grid debugging tool like Firefox which are important for web developers.
2) Brave uses a lot of computer ram so they need to fix that .— SANAM SAI SUSANTH REDDY (2021chb1053@iitrpr.ac.in)
I hope you could lay the foundation stone for developing product sense through the above observations. If you keenly observe the products around you, you’ll notice there’s a lot to learn from each product!
