Introduction

Favourite product question is a seemingly easy problem and one of the most common questions asked in a product interview. Some companies even have specific interview rounds dedicated for this case study only. A well-structured answer that clearly explains your thinking is necessary to solve this problem.

Let us first understand why the interviewer asks this question. Understanding the motive behind the question will guide us in answering it.

Why is the favourite product question asked?

This famous question is asked to evaluate the interviewee on 3 things

1. Passion for Product Management
2. Customer obsession
3. Problem-Solving skills

First, by asking the favourite product question, the interviewer wants to understand how much you know about the basics of product management. I’ve encountered many answers while taking an interview where the interviewee has said that they like a product because of its big market cap or they use it every day or the product just has a good UI.

Second, a PM must think from the user’s perspective. User empathy is all about feeling with users rather than just intellectually acknowledging their problems. User empathy guides a PM about the best problem to solve for the correct target audience.

Third, a PM's job is all about problem-solving. The interviewer wants to see if you can structurally think about the problem, and critically analyse the solutions. And what product to talk about than your favourite product!

How do we combine all the three and give an answer?

We shall be solving this question by taking Google Photos as our favourite product

Describe your favourite product

As the interviewer might not be aware of the product, it is better to start by giving a quick summary of the 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 works for both Android and iOS devices. It also allows you to create albums and search photos using advanced filters”

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

Pro tip: Think about these three key points (useful, efficient, innovative) while explaining your liking for the product. It will give structure to your answer. I recommend including examples in your answer for a better explanation.

Now that we have answered why Google Photos is our favourite product, let us clarify the scope of the 2nd part of the problem statement.

What is our goal?

“How would you improve Google Photos?” We start off by converting this question to “How would I improve X at Google Photos?”

Where X is a metric.

Here, we are expected to ask the interviewer some clarifying questions regarding the goal of improvement. The interviewer may or may not guide you in giving you the metric X. They can expect us to figure out the metric we want to improve since it is our favourite product.

Let’s try to find the metric for Google Photos which we shall improve.

Google Photos has a very big market share in photo storage. All android phones have Google Photos preinstalled in them. Compared to its competitors like Apple Photos, Instagram, and Amazon, Google Photos provide the best search and organisation tools aligned to Google’s mission of organising information. This clearly signifies that acquisition and retention metrics need not be our goal.

We recently saw users were enraged over the changes in the storage policy. Google Photos ended its unlimited free storage policy for photos and videos. The intention behind this must have been an increase in the number of paid users. So it makes complete sense to make revenue as our goal.

This refined our problem statement to “How would you improve the revenue at Google Photos?”

Pro tip: You can pick the metric based on what you know about the product, as we did in the above case. Also, you can think about what stage in the product life cycle the product is. This will help in prioritising the metric.

User Segments and Pain Points

We have explained what the product does and what its business objectives are (revenue, in our case), it’s time we identify the users and their pain points.

I want to divide users on their motive of using photo related products

1. Professional Photographers
2. Social Media Enthusiast Teens
3. Users clicking pictures of family

Let us talk more about these user segments and identify their pain points.

Professional photographers spend a lot of time getting that perfect shot. They require top-notch editing tools. They probably would already be using different tools to capture, edit, share and collect feedback on their photos. So they have the pain of switching to different tools for different operations.

Social media enthusiasts generally tend to capture a lot of images (selfies) and short videos. Their motive is to post content in less time. This means they need quick image selection and quick image editing. Also, they will be posting on multiple social media platforms, so editing images to different sizes may become an issue.

The family folks tend to capture the images of their loved ones and capture those special moments. The organisation of images is one of the biggest challenges of this user segment. The captured memories should not turn into a pile of never-to-be-found images.

After briefly talking about all the user segments, ask the interviewer which user segment we shall prioritise and solve for. Here, the interviewer may or may not help you choose one. If we were to choose, go ahead with the user segment whose problems once solved has more impact on our selected metric (in our case: revenue).

For this example, I will go ahead with the Pro Photographers segment, as I personally think they can generate a good revenue number despite being a smaller niche. (Plus, in my previous stint, I used to work closely with photographers, so I’ll enjoy more by thinking from their perspective). You can choose to go ahead with the family folks segment as they are the largest in number. Say out loud to the interviewer about your decision.

Possible Solutions

Thinking more from a professional photographers perspective, list down all the pain points and their solutions which you can think of by going through their user-flow.

This is the fun part. Once we identify the pain points, we can brainstorm various product ideas to address them. Here’s your chance to show off your passion for product management. Follow first-principles thinking and come up with simple and high-impact ideas to solve the user’s pain points.

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. Image selection for printing album: Talking about event photographers, they share all the images with their clients for the selection of images for the final album (this process is called album proofing). Selecting some images out of many and moving them into a different folder, then making changes again is a huge task from the client’s end. Google photos can include a feature of ‘marking an image as favourite’ in a shared album by the client and notifying the photographer. This will ease out the process of album proofing.
4. 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.

Prioritising the solutions

We have proposed four product features to the interviewer. Now, it's time to Prioritise!

The features should be prioritised in a way that best supports the business goal. In our case, the problem statement is “How would you improve the revenue at Google Photos?”. So, revenue is to be kept in mind.

How to prioritise? As a general rule, you shall calculate and see the ease of implementation of a feature, the number of users it’ll affect, and the quantitative impact it’ll have on a user being affected. Their amalgamation of these three metrics will tell you which feature to prioritise.

Right now, Google Photos charge its users on the storage space they consume. Keeping the pricing strategy the same, I think adding the feature of easy image selection by clients will make photographers share more images with their clients, which in turn will lead to more images being shared and hence more images being stored on their accounts. But, on the other side, the size of event photographers is small, so the impact on revenue will be less.

If Google Photos can change the pricing strategy, the ‘custom watermark’ feature and cleaning duplicate images feature can be monetised directly. Google photos can introduce a cost per image pricing model here.

We can discuss with the interviewer about their thoughts on changing the pricing model and arrive at a conclusion.

Defining the metrics

In order to gauge the success of the new product feature, we shall define the metrics to track.

For the feature of easy image selection by clients, I’ll be tracking the average increase (or % change) in the size of the photo album. For the health of the feature, I’ll measure the number of users using the ‘mark image as favourite’ option in a shared album.

For the custom watermark feature, I’ll measure the number of users using this feature and the number of images edited per user (hence the revenue). The same goes for ‘cleaning duplicate images’ feature.

We always aim for being in a win-win situation, but we can’t be that lucky. It happens quite a bit that we are required to make win-lose trade-offs. For example, a particular feature could increase revenue by 5 per cent, but 7-day retention can decrease by 10 per cent. What should the product manager do?

Mention the tradeoffs and potential problem areas to the interviewer. What are some cases where your metrics will improve but may cause negative effects on other important metrics for the platform?

Think of some potential trade-offs from these metrics to give a complete answer to the interviewer.

Summarising

We described Google Photos as our favourite product and focused on increasing its revenue. We prioritised the professional photographer’s segment and identified their pain points. We then listed some product features as possible solutions and prioritised the feature of adding ‘easy image selection by client’ as it aligned more with our aim to increase revenue at Google Photos.

I hope this article helps you in solving the favourite product interview questions in a better way. This problem could’ve been answered in many different ways depending on what metric and what user segment you prioritise. As well as how the interviewer releases information to you based on the business scenario.

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