The Product Side
Product manager interview assignment — Part 2, ideate and prioritize
How to come up with ideas and pick the most promising ones.
This post is part of a series with answers to a real interview assignments. This one is for a product manager position at Blueground. The assignment sums up to:
Step #1: Present one or more ideas to help Blueground and explain your reason for choosing them.
Step #2: Define the MVP and how to evaluate its success.
Step #3: Describe how the MVP can evolve, give a roadmap.
Let’s see how to answer step #1.
1. Ideating
Following are some ideas on various categories . I will briefly present each idea, prioritize them and then (in Part 3), I will further examine the most promising one.
Category 1 — A new business opportunity
Idea 1, Go into short-term commercial rentals
Allow landlords to rent their commercial space for a short term-event (like https://www.appearhere.co.uk/ )
- This may lead to significantly better profit margins, albeit with lower occupancy rates, therefore we need a thorough data analysis to evaluate the idea.
- This idea is a marketplace connecting landlords to brands, which is different from what Blueground does → it may affect branding and therefore may need a spinoff.
- Fortunately, Blueground already has a lot of the necessary components in place to implement the idea (technology, local teams in many cities, photographers, etc.).
Idea 2, License our software
Investigate if the software that Blueground has built in-house for its customers or suppliers (when they renovate a house, or for maintenance) can be provided to third-parties in a SaaS mode.
This is a very long shot, and I need to evaluate the existing software to see if this idea makes any sense at all and who the potential customers might be. However, if it works out, it provides an alternative revenue stream and may even become an alternative exit strategy for the investors.
Category 2 — A feature that delights customers
Idea 3, New search capabilities
Provide a better search experience and make it easier for potential customers to rent.
- Mark a listing as favourite from the search results list → Liked homes.
- Hide a home he does not want to see again in the search results → Hidden homes.
- Save a search (criteria, sorting option) and be able to easily repeat it → Saved searches.
(see Flyhomes, Airbnb, Zillow)
Idea 4, Calculate travel time
On the home details page, let a user easily calculate the travel time to any destination, starting from the home location. (see Zillow).
Idea 5, Show more search results
Decrease the height of the photos on the search results to allow for more than two rows of results to appear above the fold. Replace pagination with infinite scrolling[1].
Category 3 — A profitability initiative
Idea 6, Provide concierge services
Have the customer order concierge services (for a fee), such as taking the clothes to laundry, taking the pet for a walk, booking tickets to a play, etc. This may involve partnerships with other companies that service a specific niche.
Idea 7, Sell insurance
Offering complimentary services such as travel insurance to customers, in particular:
a) Insurance for their belongings, during their stay.
b) Travel insurance, mostly targeted to business customers.
b1) Blueground knows for certain when these customers are ending their rent (most probably traveling back to their home).
b2) Blueground may also learn when a customer will make a short trip back to her family, say for the weekend and offer her travel insurance too.
This may be highly profitable as Blueground acts as a sales channel for the insurance company, with a typical commission between 10% — 30% of the total contract value[2].
2. Prioritizing
In the world of product management many approaches have been proposed, and I have found the following approach to be particularly useful. It is simply the combination of the DHM model with a rough cost-benefit analysis, as a quick-n-dirty method to compare ideas and grade them (see below).
Obviously, this is just one method. Blueground may employ a different approach. The key point is that we need to have some way of systematically evaluating ideas and prioritizing them.
So, this is my take on the various ideas, I mention in the previous section.
Note: Blank cells would typically have a value of “No” or “None”. In order to make the table easier to read, I prefer to leave them bank instead.
The DHM model is publicly documented and there is no need to explain it. Regarding the other columns:
2.1 Extra attributes
- Users affected approximates how many users are affected; the percentages are 100, 50, 25 and 0. In Blueground’s case, we distinguish between candidate customers and paying ones.
- Easy to do means the item requires less than X (say 80) man-days to implement and does not need complex new partnerships / integrations. After becoming more familiar with the company, we may replace this column with a high-level estimate of the necessary effort to implement an idea, as validated by the UX and dev teams. Effort may come in sizes: small, medium, large, x-large.
(The important thing, is what is it the scope of our estimate? Are we trying to estimate the full-fledged new feature or just its MVP? I suggest that we try to estimate the candidate MVP. It is smaller in scope and easier to comprehend. Only after we create the MVP and the results are encouraging, do we need to estimate the effort for the next version of the feature. As you can clearly see in Part 4, it is obviously not “easy” to create the entire roadmap of the concierge services.)
2.2 Grading
Grading is a simple way to assign a numeric value to attributes of the various ideas. Although the value is not precise, it can open very interesting discussions and help a lot in comparing ideas.
- Benefit: we add the points of the first four columns:
- For each one of the three columns of the standard DHM model:
Yes = 2 points
Maybe = 1 point
No or blank = 0 points. - Users affected:
Enter new market = 5 points.
100% or “All” = 3 points
50% = 2 points
25% = 1 point.
2. Cost: The points of the “Easy to do” column, as follows:
Yes = 1 point
Maybe = 2 points
No value or hard = 3 points.
In case you have substituted the “Easy to do” column with an effort estimate you can use the following point system for the estimates: small = 1 point, medium = 2 points, large = 3 points, x-large = 5 points.
3. Grade = Benefit / Cost.
Also, if the ideas become many then drawing them on a cost vs benefit graph may help with visualization.
The candidate ideas presented so far, differ a lot in scope (as they belong to different categories). Since the goal of this assignment is to showcase a way of thinking, in Part 3, we will further examine “Idea 6 — concierge services” which has more “beef” for analysis compared to the other top-scoring “Idea 3 — new search capabilities”.
