WhatsApp: Product Analysis

With more than 2 Billion monthly users in over 180 countries, WhatsApp is a product that continues to excite me as a user as well as an aspiring consumer-tech Product Manager interested in building and scaling products.

WhatsApp Key Features:

• Integration with phone number as account for low hassle
• Works across various platforms (iOS, Android, Web, etc)
• Simple to use
• No gimmicks of the Freemium model
• Ad-free implementation model!
• End-to-end encryption for security

Based on my engagement level on this platform starting from early morning video calls with my mom, talking to other family members, connecting with old school friends, utilizing group chats to sharing traveling and cooking diaries as stories, WhatsApp remains to be my favorite product. Several user personas for WhatsApp came up on my mind while writing this article, but I am restricting myself to these three for keeping this post short & relevant.

1. Chatty Varun: Varun texts and shares images to various people every day. As he has to pay huge monthly bills for unlimited international calling and texting plans with his carrier, he is seeking a mechanism to connect with friends and family internationally.
2. Business User Ayan: Ayan is the owner of a small business firm. He is interested in separating his personal and business conversations from the normal message app to a totally different platform through which he can communicate with local customers and quickly reply to their messages.
3. Group Master Neeta: Neeta works as a planner and for every upcoming event, such as a group of yoga classes, wedding planning, friends get-together, family trip, etc, she creates a new group. She is looking for a platform where she can contact numerous participants easily and add them to a specific group for better coordination for the activity planning.

Being a part of the first user persona, I would like to share some problems specific to this set of people using WhatsApp.

• Organizing payments with friends and relatives — Have you ever forgotten to pay your friends? Or maybe they forgot to pay you back? And have you ever had problems when not having the same payment platforms as your friends? This is a problem that Chatty Varun faces more often among all the other problems listed.

Design Proposal for WhatsApp Pay

• Mechanism of converting voice to text — Given the tremendous stress on AI, VR, and ML, there should be a feature enabling users to communicate via voice command vs typing or book.
• Inability to send high-quality images and videos — A limitation on WhatsApp due to its low data usage principle to work in a large number of countries and locations.

Analyzing the tradeoffs from the implementation and user impact perspective, I came up with the following:

• Organizing payments via WhatsApp — High cost for implementation but the high impact for users (it requires several UI/UX changes along with back end code implementation changes for integration with the 3rd party payment merchants)
• Communication via voice command — Medium implementation cost but a higher user impact ( as WhatsApp is a subsidiary of Facebook, it can leverage the most interesting things that FB is already doing in ML research)
• Sending high-quality images and videos — Low implementation cost and high impact for users (it requires the collaboration of WhatsApp with other partner or 3rd parties which can both serve and provide a platform for sharing images & videos and only sharing URLs and links on the WhatsApp)

Seeing the above feasibility analysis, I will prioritize these problems into the following buckets:

Priority 1: Sending high-quality images

Priority 2: Communication via voice command leveraging the ML principles

Priority 3: Organizing payments via WhatsApp

Key metrics for measuring the success of the features implemented, I will use the following,

1. Number of messages sent through this platform
2. Number of voice and video calls made on this platform
3. Number of images shared per user
4. Average speed for sharing per image
5. Number of Daily Active Users (DAUs)
6. Number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs)

Vanity metrics are things like DAUs and MAUs. They are easily manipulated and do not significantly correlate to the numbers that actually matter: user engagement, active users, the cost associated with getting new customers, and eventually profits and revenues. The metrics 1 and 2 listed above are more actionable metrics.

These KPIs will definitely help in tracking the success of the features implemented.

All-in-all, WhatsApp is a terrific example of building and beautifully scaling a consumer-tech product across multiple platforms. I look forward to how it can delight users more and the next phase of its journey- effective monetization!

I would like to hear any questions, thoughts, or comments.