Day 5 - Product Design Question 3

Practice product design questions with us...

Hello learners!

Welcome to the 5th day of the series 30 Days of PM Interview by Crework! It’s time to practice one more product design question. This will be our last one (for now) before we move to the next topic.

But before we start, make sure you are subscribed to us. In case you are not, subscribe to us right now and complete the challenge.

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Imagine you're a PM ✨

Your practice question for today is:

How would you improve Spotify as a podcast app?

Now, before we move on to “how should we approach it” part, I want you to try it. Come on, pause here for a while, bring a notebook and pen and try this question.

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First step: Ask clarifying question

Before we start, I have some questions:

1. Who are we improving the product for? Creators or Consumers?

2. Why is Spotify doing this? What’s the business goal here?

3. When we say improve, is there any specific definition of improvement we have?

4. Is there any resources or time constraint for this? What’s the launch window?

You can ask other questions that might clarify the situation for you. Ask anything that you think might help you get context.

But, don’t ask too many questions. 2-3 meaningful and well thought questions are good enough to give you the right context.

Second step: Take some time to think about it

This is very important. Try to absorb the information you just got. Don’t jump to conclusions or the first ‘solution’, try to understand the problems first.

Third step: Identify the goals and personas

Now, in this step, you are supposed to share whatever you are thinking with the interviewer so that they know the direction you are taking. Generally, this is how it goes:

I am taking a few assumptions related to this problem that I need to validate.

1. The business goal for Spotify here is to increase the revenue share from podcasts and eventually turning them profitable.

2. The improvements in the application can be translated into better experience for the consumers, which can be measured with higher retention and more watch time.

3. So, the goal for us is to improve the application leading to higher retention and more watch time.

4. There is no specific launch window, but we are aiming to see the results in the next quarter’s numbers.

We are trying to solve the problem for the podcast consumers here. The podcast consumers can be classified into these personas:

1. Power users - Users who listen to more than 10 hours of podcast per week

2. Average listeners - Users who listen to 5-7 hours of podcast in a week

3. Casual listeners - Users who listen to less than 3 hours of podcast in a week

For this problem, I will prioritize Average and Power Users as they might have more overlapping problems that can be solved and the scope for increasing the watch time is there in average listeners as they already show the intent to listen to podcasts.

Fourth step: Identifying problems and coming up with solutions

1. Some pain points of the users:

   1. In depth content discovery is hard. The user finds it hard to decide what to listen next after a podcast if they want to go deeper into a topic.

   2. Podcast recommendations are biased. Finds it hard to discover new podcasts related to the topic they are interested in. Most of the recommended podcasts are popular ones, but not the right ones.

   3. Hard to decide if this podcast is worth listening to. As the time commitment is much more for a podcast than a song, users take a long time in deciding if they want to listen to the podcast or not.

2. Solving these problems will potentially increase the average watch time, improve user experience and contribute to the company goals too.

3. Solution:

   1. Subject specific playlists

      1. Auto playlist formation on topics that the user is currently listening to. For example: If I start listening to a podcast about Product Led Growth, this feature would suggest a playlist containing follow up podcasts on PLG, ideally more in-depth.

      2. This will also solve for podcast recommendations as the users will be getting recommendations for new podcasts in the same playlist.

   2. Sneak Peak

      1. A feature to add 15-30 seconds clip with every podcast to set the tone for what the podcast will be about.

      2. While a podcast is recommended to the user, this clip is also shown. This will drive curiosity hence the user would want to watch that podcast too.

4. Metrics to track success:

   1. Week-on-Week retention

   2. Month-on-Month retention

   3. Average listen time per user

   4. Increase in ad revenue due to increase in watch time

This was an example of how you can approach a product design question asked in a PM interview. There can be multiple ways of approaching the same problem, and there is no “right” answer. The interviewer wants to assess your ability to think and come up with a solution. The real answer is the process you use to come up with your solution.

I would love to see the solution you came up with. Please share it with us on twitter or reply to this mail.

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Day 5 - Completed ✅

Congratulations on completing the 5th lesson of the series 30 Day of PM Interview. 🥳 Now, you know what to do. Share your learnings with the world and be accountable.

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