"How Would You Design a Gardening App?" | Google PM Mock Interview

Key Takeaways

hi everyone my name is B shine from product management exercises and today I'm here with my friend Gabe who's the product manager from San Francisco and has been using our website product management exercises calm to sharpen his PM skills and he's volunteered to do a mock interview with us today so the question that we're going to do today is how would you design a gardening gap Gabe would you like to say a few words before we start no I think I think it's fine I'm happy to get get stuck until I really love the product management exercises come website and and been really enjoying sort of you know doing some of the exercise I think is it's made me a much better product manager really helped me think on the fly a lot more analytically and really break things down and as you'll see you know we get into what does the user need was a user journey what are the solutions how would we measure it all these kinds of things and I think it's really made me a better product manager in my you know in my day-to-day work and I really love that so thank you so much for making such a great our community here all right so let's get into it how would you design a gardening out okay so just to start off with first I just wanted to clarify am I just a startup or am i a big company that's crane this is is this Google or Facebook that's crazy or is it a startup you can assume that it's a startup that's creating this okay awesome all right so I'm a start-up and I'm assuming I'm a you know for-profit startup I think and this is the v1 product from from scratch exert one product so I think for that we really want to optimize for kind of acquisition and engagement so the next step I want to take is to think to think through some some of the different user segments for who might use this so when I think about that I can think of sort of personal and then I can also think of a kind of business so on a personal side we have sort of amateur gardeners and hobbyist gardeners who want to learn how to garden or improve their gardening abilities and then on the business side you know I can think of people that do professional people that do landscaping and you know maybe businesses that sell plants like nurseries and stuff like and places like that so I really need to focus on one of them I'm seeing this as being like a I'm personally really I've been getting more into gardening recently I think that particularly with with cupboard and people being sort of stuck at home there's a lot more interest in literally house plants but also you know you gardening in your terrorist saying your backyard and things like that and I suspect that that's just gonna continue even after think people once you take up a hobby like that tends to stick even after code but you know something that clearly goes away so I think I'd really like to focus on these kind of amateur gardeners and then I see later on potentially you know I focusing on monetization but later on maybe we can focus on how to match those with with you know professional people I like landscapers or people that are selling plants but to start off with I'm just gonna focus on the needs of the sort of amateur hobbyist gardeners sounds good so the next step I want to take is I really like to think about the user journey so what does it user journey of someone who is a hobbyist gardener so the first thing is they need to choose the the plant what figure out what kind of plants they want to plant I really need to learn a little bit of basic information about it first but then it's going to leave them to choosing what kind of plants you want to plant purchase then they need to purchase the the plants and other material they plant them then they need to cultivate and grow them and then depending on type plans it is you know harvest right if it's if it's a vegetable plant versus just flowers or you know like a evergreen just beautiful plan like a you know tree or something like that you know they're in a harvest that and then I'm just thinking also maybe there's something about you know sharing about it and connecting with the community or something like that so I think that um I kind of want to since there's an MVP I wanna even at this stage figure out which of the must-haves sections of the user journey and I think the most important is figuring out what plants to plant planting them and then probably cultivating them and growing them although actually you know and I think I think harvesting them sharing about them maybe even purchasing them at this early stage is um not as not as essential as it must have whereas the choosing what plants you want being able to plant them and be able to cultivate them a must-have whereas the rest of them like nice to have so this at this early stage so I'm gonna now try to figure out pain points for each of those must have sections of the user journey so let me think about the we think about pain points so so we have just riding on a Google Doc yes okay so we have choosing the plants to plant so let me think about a few different pain points there so I can think of not not knowing what kind of plants are suitable for the climate amount of space you need how much effort is gonna take for cultivation right those are some pain points they might have so next user jet step in the journey was that I said it was must have was let me look back was planting them sometimes skipping out on the the purchasing them because I think you can go to Home Depot and purchase pretty easily and I think that's a must-have but planting them I think also understanding you know how to plant them what kind of soil I need and I and I know must maybe yeah group that and then the next step is our cultivating them and this is where I actually think there's probably a lot of pain points so how often do I need to water them I don't know that often times I I forget to water them also I've noticed that with my pain sorry with my houseplants they sometimes they get spotty they'll get yellow leaves and I don't know what I'm doing wrong too much rewarding too little so diagnosing like diseases and issues and so yeah I think I think I went through the main pain points so now the next step I want to do is I want to go through some solutions so not knowing what kind of plants are suitable so actually I can I need to prioritize those I kind of prioritize a little bit earlier which is just that I think I I need to I must address for MBP something I think about each of these if I had to I think I do need to figure out a lot of plants I want I want to know how to plant them oftentimes if I buy a pre potted plant also have a didn't need that but if I'm getting something from seeds we calling this gardening and I I see a pleasure to clarify this earlier but I think of gardening as incorporating house plants as well as like - cucumbers and tomato trees and things like that so that that was my thought here so I was I was thinking that um that gardening would include how both houseplants and like outdoor kind of plants with indoor and outdoor so I do think that planting is a must have which I mentioned before and I also think that um cultivating you know is also a must have so I'm now actually going to get to [Music] prioritizing the so coming out some solutions okay so not know what kind of plants are suitable one solution that I can think of is some kind of like profile that's kind of wizard or like onboarding onboarding process final funnel or something that way you get asked a series of questions about your goals your time commitment your price range you know your climate all these kind of things and then it could have a suggestion of plants that would be good for you give you like a proposed plan how to plant them and how to cultivate them I actually think kind of go those two pain points like understanding how to plant them what kind of soil I need house name water them I almost think they kind of go together so so some solutions there are give content on most common plants at the very least you need to give content on the recommended plans your head so maybe there's you know 50 to 100 different 100 different types of plants that I'm recommending to a plant and for each of those I need to get content on on how to plant them how often they need to be watered and and common issues the next thing so so that's a solution they're forgetting to water them I think we could have a tool for logging when you water them and then getting reminders push notifications most likely for when you need to water them again and then diagnosing diseases and issues with them I think they're obviously you could have content about it but I actually am really interested in thinking okay well how might I use like ml or AI to diagnose these diseases I think it could be difficult this is gonna be that's gonna be harder but I'm just gonna go no AI ml for for you know you could take take a photo for example take a photo of your plant and then get told what the disease is like what the likely issue is and disease and what you should do oh and also similarly for it actually got me thinking I'm gonna flip back to planting them it would be kind of cool to like knowing what plants you want a plant would be cool to maybe be able to use AR to superimpose what what your plants will look like on to your environment so if I bookshelf I want to see what the snake plant looks like on top of that I can see that or if I have it be how do you wanna see what cucumber like cucumber and kale will look like growing there I can see that so that'd be kind of cool okay so I think now my next step is to prioritize some of those solutions right yeah okay so I'm gonna try to just create I'm using a Google Doc to write up my notes here and I'm just going to create a table for each of those solutions and what I want to do is I want solution down I'm going to write impact on the user like how valuable it is to the user and effort effort to build and then I'm gonna say is this a must-have based on that or a you know nice to have right yeah and that's effectively gonna tell me whether it's gonna be in the MVP or it's gonna be in you know in b2 right yeah just thinking you know how our goals here are acquisition engagement so I wonder whether I should also be thinking about whether this is going to be really important for acquisition or engagement so maybe I have a third one there the characterization so alignment with acquisition or engagement okay okay so the first solution I said was having some kind of profile onboarding process to figure out what plants you want to have so profile and suggested plants impact the user I think it's pretty high that's a pretty major pain point and the effort to build I actually think things a wizard like this I think it wouldn't be too hard to build I mean at least the initial funnel is pretty low and on the back end you're gonna need some kind of database with you know a few hundred plants that are going to be categorized by score according to different metrics for example I'm thinking you know climate time and effort to like cultivation effort you know indoor/outdoor amount of space that you need so I'm thinking like I'm thinking on the back end we would have a few different things like a climate how difficult it is to cultivate a you know are you are a novice or an advanced gardener and how much time do you want to invest in it how costly is it how long does it take to you know grow to get fruit something like that you know have a few different things we can score each of them and so I don't think it would be too hard if we if we did it so I've got a hundred different plans to start off with um so I'm gonna say like you know low medium effort may be in alignment with acquisition or engagement and I think it's pretty high actually I think it'd be super interesting I think I would download it to get that suggestion so I'm gonna okay so I'll go back to the must-haves nice to have later on the Lord okay so now next one I had him planting them solution I had was content on the most common plants I think the impact when the user is very high you have to have that effort to build it really depends if we're using our own content or we can license content or use existing content if I can figure out ways to use like free Commons content is the free app to begin with as well then I think the effort would be relatively low because I think a lot of this stuff is already out there but I just don't know whether it's gonna be like how costly it is gonna be if we need to what if you need to license it so well you know actual building of content like just a you know HTML or whatever there I guess it would be HTML but just writing the content to a static screen is more difficult but build it getting the content would be hard and we'd have to figure out like what is the 8020 of plans for example like 80 percent I'm sure it is 80 percent of the plans people want is only 20 percent of the plans that are out there even even more even less than that right I'd say if I go to you know Home Depot or something like that Lowe's and I look at the plans there there's well you know it's 300 but not many thousands of different varieties they're so good just do that less so I think I'm gonna say low but I could be persuaded that it's more like a media method acquisition I don't think it's super I don't think it's yeah it's a medium on acquisition engagement I mean I think it's important but it's not gonna like really attract people because I can get that kind of information elsewhere the next thing I have is on cultivating them so I sort of said that was the next thing I had was a are to superimpose plants will look like I think the impact on the user is medium it's not like super important an effort to build is kind of high but I also think the acquisition engagement impact could be really high like it's really interesting and fun kind of thing to do so I don't know let's go back to that and then similarly diagnosing issues with plants using ml and like computer vision kind of stuff right like basically effectively it's like Google reverse image search it's not super complicated but I think I think the impact to users actually hi there and effort to build I actually think that I know there's a Google lens for example right has it I don't know if you use google lens but basically that enables you to take a photo and you just click a button and I'll tell you what the photo is and I'm pretty sure that has an API now so I think that you know you know if you to create this like computer vision categorization from scratch that would be super difficult to build but if you can use like google lens a bright glare cloud you know ml api or whatever to tap into their existing categorizations and i think would be just like medium effort so i don't know i don't know exactly the details of that API but I think it'd be really cool if we could get it to work so I put medium effort I'm gonna assume that you can use their API building from scratch I don't know but I'm gonna assume that and the alignment a cliche engagement I actually think would be really high I think I could imagine that you do a whole at marketing campaign around this and be really good requisition I can imagine it's a very gauging feature feature there and yeah and then I think so so those are the things that I have now so the must-haves have one two three four it's of four solutions let me think about a few more they did have some more solutions I guess some other solutions there which I kind of said was not a must-have plant beaubien nice to have would be you know like showing people where to buy the products in their local area or online and giving them like inexpensive links but again I already sort of I kind of struct that one out already from the beginning as I thought that it wasn't super relevant but it's like a fifth solution that we could change to do later on for monetization so now I'm going to go to the must haves versus nice-to-have so I said profile is suggested plans impact news a high if the build medium a Lima acquisition hive so I'm gonna say it's a must-have content in the most common plants I just think that I say the impact to use a high effort to build low the could be could be more at medium and aligned with the acquisition engagement medium but I still think it's a must have like I just I don't think you can have an app like this without content like that so I think I'm still having some hay out of superimpose what the plants would look like I think it's a nice to have I don't think like I don't really need um you know a 3d model of a snake plan you know - or like a cucumber plant to figure out what its gonna look like it's just I don't think it's it it's a must have it's kind of a cool gimmick but it's not a must-have if I was a interior decorating kind of app they're much more so but not for this I'm diagnosing issues with plans I'm really I think that's super interesting and if we can do with the API I'm gonna I'm gonna say that I'm gonna include it but it's still nice to have but depending on effort I would I'd say it's like a and they'll say it's I should have you know somewhere between nice to have a must-have and then shrimpy or where to build their product online Orissa that's a nice to have so I prioritize the solutions now I guess so what I basically I have a product that allows people to get a personalized plan for what they should plant learn about how to plant them and take care of them just to summarize here and has content the most calm plants and then finally oh you know what I also missed sorry I missed out on a potential solution there actually which was reminders reminders for winter water and logging I think that that's the impact on the user I guess is medium I mean a camera I'm just thinking about myself I can remember to do that stuff without but so useful an effort to build is pretty low I think just having a simple logging features and pretty not very complex these days in a mobile app development and application I don't think on engagement it's like maybe medium so I'm gonna put that as it as a nice to have it off and then and then the final product is so I said get a personalized plan for how they should for what they should plant learn about how to plant them take care of them and probably have a way to use MLA I to diagnose plant diseases and issues so now I want to get to how it evaluate success so actually I've talked about engagement and acquisition and I think I like to think of these in two ways one is like very broadly acquisition engagement very broadly about acquisition engagement but then also how are the features specifically that I've created being used so it's sort of a lot more sort of macro and then more micro so at a more macro level you know how many how many apps are being so how many downloads and growth over time and probably weekly I don't think see this is something that people don't use every day but potentially weekly and monthly active usage and and also you know maybe second month for tension so after they use it the first month so they come back and use it again in that second month after they first signed up and when I say how many downloads I'm probably morning's not just in downloads but like actual signups so now let me dive a little bit deeper into the specific features so I have a pretty interesting and sort of well developed I well I have an idea of quite a well-developed onboarding so I want to look at how many people complete the onboarding and that's almost my my you know activation metric and then within that I might want to see you know what what are the are the most chosen you know options for example so it's gonna be really seems me as more people house plans is and what we were looking for outdoors people looking for vegetable gardening and that's really going to help me improve it over time for one point you know be 1.2 or be 2 or whatever and then I also want to figure out how many people looking how many users are looking at the content and growth over time and what specific plants they're researching and viewing that's again gonna help me figure out what people most interested in and then the MLA I feature how many times is this is is used to user per month how accurate is it I also want to figure out I probably want build in some kind of feedback like is how helpful was this entire it is it so I've got quite a few different things I'm now going to try to pick out one primary one and one and then a few secondary ones so I think my primary one given that I want you know acquisition my primary acquisition metric is gonna be I think sort of an activation metric so how many people are completing their onboarding how many people have completed the onboarding and growth over time and then some secondary metrics because that just gives me an idea of people actually using this app at least getting past the first step and there's some secondary metrics that I want to be looking at just broadly weekly and monthly active usage and then you know how many people I look looking at content like looking at content and specifically I guess how many unique pieces of content have been viewed you know per user per month and and these sort of more feature things like how many how often is the ml AI used per month per user and how accurate so to summarize to summarize I built an app for gardening I went through the user journey came up with some different you know pain points and solutions and I came down to a product that it gives people a personalized plan for what they should plant they learn about how to plant them take care of them for the most common types of plants sort of the 80/20 of plants and then I'd also really like to depending on further investigation on the effort for this MLA I feature is have a way to take a photo of a plan and diagnose issues with it and my primary metric would be the activation metric which is completing my onboarding and I had a bunch of secondary metrics more specific to features well thank you so much thank you is there anything you wanna add or say so give me some feedback no feedback would be good yeah all right sounds good well I think I really like the structure of your answer it was well-structured you started off by asking on some you started off by breaking down the user groups into the amateur versus the business groups and then saying why you think dad's focusing on the amateur makes sense I think the reasoning was very well justified then you went over the different basically phases of the user journey and then you described why you plan to prioritize certain phases and then you really broke down those phases into like particular pain points that are relevant they're not user group for that particular phase and then you came up with solutions for them the solutions were very on some of them were out of box which is great I read I can I saw them work commission --all and this is a really good mixture of kind of like thinking about new ideas and also thinking about hey if you know somebody forgets to water well I mean there's a nigga's easy way to solve that and that is notifications and it's really good to kind of like mix the two I think your evaluation was really good you picked some meaningful criteria to evaluate and decide whether or not on these as these down solutions were practical for you to build and then you came up with some metrics on one of the particularly related to primary and you had some secondary metrics as well I think a couple of feedbacks that I would have is one on I think after you mentioned on your acquisition and engagement as like kind of your key criteria I would have liked to hear more about why I think you briefly mentioned that you want to go with acquisition and engagement I'm just giving some a little bit more context behind why you think these two are relevant I think would have helped on the second part is after you listed the first five five solutions he evaluated them and then you kind of went back and like brainstormed more solutions um I would have just done all the brainstorming is at once and then move on to evaluation and I know sometimes there's like new ideas come to mind once you start like evaluating them but to be honest the five solutions that you came up with were good enough that maybe would have been sufficient for you to just like proceed even if new ideas came in um after evaluation when you did the basically coming up with lists of metrics to measure the success of your product I think your primary metric was around a number of people who basically completed onboarding and I think it's good to figure out how you can tie that in to on the pain point a user came for to Tucson so for example if it's finding a plant it could be number of people who completed onboarding and did at least think you know one search or number of people like that on-boarded and you know took one picture as an indication that hey they did try to actually find diagnose what the issue with their plant something that kind of ties it into more the actual users of the product I think would have been really helpful just because it could be that a lot of people signed up on they hit some sort of a friction point and they never actually get to use the product so I think that would be my feedback overall thank you so much this is hopefully the community liked it and the community finds is valuable again Bijan from product management exercises um feel free to subscribe to our youtube channel or if you're preparing for a PM interview visit our website at product management exercises comm you'll see a lot of product manager interview questions and answers from the community you'll see a way to schedule a mock interviews with other members of the website and you'll see a bunch of interview guys for those that are preparing for their PM job interviews thank you again have a great day Thanks