Curriculum - Improve Headspace

how would you improve headspace [Music] hey everyone welcome back to another exponent products management mock interview my name is kevin and on today's show we have ore who's a product manager and we're gonna go through a product design product sense type mock interview and before we get into that or do you mind introducing yourself to the audience yeah for sure hey kevin hey everyone my name is orr i'm a product manager at coinbase uh and prior to coinbase i was a product manager at youtube excited to be here thanks for having me awesome it's great

to have you on the show or so for today's question like i mentioned we're going to be doing a product sense product design question it's a pretty open-ended question and we're going to just kind of test your creativity and see how you think so the question i like to ask is well first are you familiar with headspace yeah it's one of my favorite apps so the question i like to ask is how would you improve headspace would you improve headspace okay cool uh and is it okay for us just a few clarifying questions yes of

course awesome uh so maybe the first question is is it okay if i assume i'm a pm at headspace or is there a different company i should be thinking about yeah let's assume that you're a pm at headspace okay and is there a specific reason why we might go about uh improving it was there any kind of constraint or any feedback we got i'm happy to also make assumptions nope there's nothing from my end so let's just say this is pretty open-ended and it's up to you okay great thanks for clarifying uh do you mind

if i just take kind of 30 seconds just to collect my thoughts and think how to approach this question i feel free awesome and i'm gonna be uh i think you're already sharing my screen but you can kind of get a sneak peek into how i'm thinking about it directly in the dark perfect all right thank you thank you for your patience kevin so here's just a quick tld on how i'm thinking to to approach this question uh and then you know let me know if you want me to add anything or maybe perhaps even

de-prioritize given uh the time constraints uh so first i think it makes sense as a pm at headspace i would like to think you know what is the broader goal for what headspace is trying to achieve and then from that try and think you know what is kind of a bit more specific goal for us to focus on when thinking about how we would go about improving headspace once we define that perhaps we can think about the target audience of headspace perhaps pick a specific niche of a user audience think about their pain points and

finally come up with a bunch of creative solutions uh for how we'd go about improving it does that sound good anything else you want me to add here or do you prioritize nope this sounds good let's go ahead with this awesome okay so let's start with a broader goal you know i think i already mentioned this but headspace is one of my favorite apps i absolutely love it it changed my life and and when i think about the mission uh headspace is trying to achieve don't catch me on the ward here i'm not working at

headspace but i think it's something along the lines of improve health and happiness in the world and so unhappiness in the world and so when i when i think about improving uh you know improving the app perhaps one one way for us to think about it from a product perspective uh we could try and maybe just focus on making it easier to use and by making it easier to use we would be helping headspace achieve the mission of improving health and happiness now from a business perspective i think that would ultimately translate into higher engagement

within the app by us uh making it easier to use so i'm just going to write here engagement as a direct business goal i'm going to pause here for just a second see if that makes sense or if you have any questions before i move on to the next section which is the user segmentation yeah thanks for pausing how would you define engagement here yeah so engagement in within the context of headspace is really so you know when we think about headspace people come into the app in order to meditate and so many number of

minutes meditated would ultimately translate into a higher engagement within the app and so to answer your question specifically uh perhaps it would be just meditations or if we were to put a specific uh kpi here it would be a number of minutes meditated does that answer your question yup sounds good awesome all right so uh let's think a little bit about the users uh of of headspace and i can think about as as a user myself you know i can think about many many different personas finding value within headspace you know that could be you

know working professionals in in the tech industry it could be uh you know teachers or parents who just need a moment here to just pause from hectic life it could be students or even you know youngsters who are you know going through uh difficult times uh that may find benefit in in in headspace but if i really kind of had to think hard in a way that would potentially segment all of the users in kind of a messy way in a mutually exclusive way i can think of three segmentations the first one is really the

skeptics right the skeptics are those that you know they never really tried headspace uh they don't kind of relate to the idea perhaps they tried it once but it didn't resonate with them then we also have kind of the rookies right uh you know tried it a few times uh you know saw some value uh but could not uh form it into a habit or could not get into the groove of continually continuously meditating and i'm just gonna add it here so we have it in the dark so the skeptics are kinda like never used

it uh never used the app perhaps once um don't relate to the idea and then lastly we have kind of the die-hards right uh you know those people are a little bit like me in the sense that's how i see it you know they're kind of the uh the people who were somewhat enlightened who somewhat see the direct impact of headspace in their everyday life um and uh and uh and they there's no question about it they already formed a habit perhaps they're going to retreats um and they would be the ones advocating for for

meditations uh so you know what what i want to do here perhaps now is maybe uh take a moment to prioritize the user segment that we should be focusing on and the way i would like to think about is perhaps think about a prioritization criteria within this context i think perhaps two criteria comes to mind that's the tam total addressable market plus the unmet needs and let me let me explain what i mean by that so from a time perspective i'm not necessarily thinking about the entire universe i'm thinking about the users who are actually

using headspace today because the goal here is to make it easier to use for the existing users we want to improve headspace um in in this context i think rookies are probably the highest segment that we have here in addition to that in terms of unmet needs what i mean by that uh i'm kind of thinking what is the segment with the highest friction and so the diehards are already you know they're seeing the benefits the skeptics you could argue they have a lot of friction but they may somewhat not even have head space or

they're a bit upper upper in the funnel and so in terms of making it easier to use i would like to focus on on the rookies does that make sense yeah so it sounds like um you're targeting people who are aware of headspace but they want to kind of help them see the value a little bit more so they can become diehards exactly precisely yep sounds good awesome so let's double click on rookies and perhaps this is one of my favorite uh moments as a pm i try to kind of emphasize uh and emphasize with

the user and really think hard what is their pain points so perhaps give me uh just a few moments here just to collect my thoughts sounds good okay uh okay so so i've listed a few of them you can already kind of get a sneak peek into how i'm thinking about it but really in high level i'm thinking about just like a funnel right so in terms of pain points we have the kind of pre-meditation during meditation and post-meditation and obviously you could think of many many other pain points but i think those are the

the biggest ones that comes to mind at the moment uh pre-meditation i think the biggest pain point as someone who you know is just getting into this space uh is ready to remember to to meditate you know we're so busy we get caught up with day-to-day life forming a a habit is is a really hard thing there's many many books about it so that's one big pain point the second pain point is for those who actually remember to meditate and they take the effort to do it while you're meditating perhaps one of the biggest pain

point at least personally that i found is to concentrate you know your mind is kind of chasing with thoughts sometimes those background noises that kind of makes you wonder if you have family you may have kids knocking on your door and really the list goes on so how can we help uh those rookies concentrate better and then lastly i think after you meditate sometimes especially if you're a rookie or if you're someone who haven't meditated a lot it's it's somewhat difficult to see the direct impact meditation has in our day-to-day life you know in many

ways uh you know we're very reactive and emotional to a lot of things that are happening to us but as we meditate in in a consistent way we can become more conscious and mindful and steer our our energy towards the things that really matter and when when you can do that we can you can be conscious of it you can really see the impact of meditation but when you don't it's much harder so those are three pain points again uh i i think it makes sense to have a prioritization criteria so let's think about the

uh the the criteria here and what makes most sense for us so perhaps i'm thinking of two criteria uh one is how you know acute the problem is and perhaps uh what is the frequency right so they essentially like the depth and breadth right like how how how challenging that problem is and how often does it happen uh and just because of conscious of time you know i'm just gonna kind of look at those pain points and try and take a stab at it but definitely you know keep me honest here if you feel otherwise

i think just looking at it i think the upper funnel is probably the the broadest in terms of frequency and so everyone have some issues or some challenges with you know remembering to to meditate uh and ultimately if you're not accustomed to making it a habit this is a big problem for you because you may not find the time you may not find the energy to to go ahead and meditate so i think i would like to focus on the pain point of forgetting to meditate slash performing it a ha as a habit [Music] in

order to improve headspace i'm gonna pause here and see if that's okay or if you have any questions yeah i think this makes sense if people are rookies and they're not even remembering to meditate they're not gonna be able to even see the other two pain points so yeah i'm curious to see how you would tackle this awesome awesome cool so let's move on into a few let's try and think about a few creative solutions i'm gonna try and be mindful of you know the kind of long-term versus uh short-term effort as well as engineering

requirements and uh and design requirements we might have to be uh aware while prioritizing the solution so i'll try and give kind of a a breath of different options here give me maybe like 10 or 20 seconds just to brainstorm a few ideas if that's okay yeah that sounds good okay thank you kevin uh for bearing with me uh so i can think of three ideas here let me kind of walk you through uh explain what each one of them means and then we can go through a quick prioritization exercise to really conclude how we

should go about improving improving the app first i can think of reminders right reminders can be many many different things and so it's a pretty big bucket here for example we could have you know a calendar integration with google or with apple or whatever your calendar your your default calendar is that would you know remind you to meditate um you could also potentially have like physical stickers headspace is a subscription-based app and so when someone subscribes to the app you know and they pay i think a hundred dollars a year or something like that a

headspace could actually send them a few cool stickers that they could kind of post put around maybe in the bathroom maybe on on their laptop maybe on the screen and that could be a kind of physical reminder that they should be meditating and then lastly we could also similar to calendar integration we could do like app notifications so uh you know very straightforward so that's on the reminders uh idea on to move on on this the the second idea is really the support group and what i'm thinking here is you know it's so as a

father you know it's so much easier to neglect myself whereas with when it comes to my daughter it's very clear to me if she's not feeling well i'm going to take her to the doctor it's very clear to me that that she should be eating healthy yet i find myself eating in front of the computer in in front of meetings i guess the point i'm trying to make here is when you have a support group and you create this report with someone it's much more difficult to disappoint them than disappoint yourself and so creating this

support group where you can have you know live meetings uh perhaps you can have reflection meetings um perhaps you can have this like weekly you know weekly cadence right where you meet and and it will be just so much harder to disappoint them than than others uh by creating this habit and then lastly i'm thinking some sort of a scoreboard leaderboard with friends uh you know end of day we're human beings and we naturally tend to be competitive in in our space and so how can we take that competitiveness and turn it into our advantage

and so perhaps we can have some badge system where we're ranking people and we're incentivizing people to form it into a habit and do more of it perhaps we could also do reminders uh to inform when your friends kind of were able to increase their rank in their in their leaderboard so those are just three kind of three main ideas i'm thinking about now perhaps and i know we're almost coming at times so i'll try to be quick here perhaps let's take a moment to prioritize the different options and see what makes more sense from

a practical kind of down to earth perspective and so the two uh prioritization criteria that comes to mind here is really you know loe or level of effort and impact in terms of when i say impact i'm going to go back into you know the the product and business goals and perhaps what's going to help me increase engagement the most or help people meditate more and so you know usually what i would do here i would probably just like score uh each one of them into like low medium and high or perhaps give it like

an actual score from 0 to 10 but just because we're we're up in time it's going to take a stab at what makes most sense given those two prioritization criteria and i would love for you to keep me honest here and i think just from in terms of level of effort reminders seems like fairly low uh like a calendar integration should be pretty straightforward app notification should be uh pretty easy and creating physical stickers again pretty straightforward in terms of impact i think that could actually uh do quite a tremendous uh um improvement in terms

of reminding people where to meditate but obviously i don't i want i want to be pretty much assumptions less and so i would advocate for starting off with some sort of an experiment uh for reminders and validate you know these assumptions further so just to summarize here you know kevin you asked me how would i go about to improve headspace uh we looked at the mission and we set some business goals uh for what we would like to achieve uh we prioritize a specific user segment which are the rookies representing the biggest segment of headspace

and we looked at our pain points and we concluded that forgetting to meditate or forming a habit is probably the biggest way to improve the app for that segment and then we we looked at different solutions and we ultimately prioritized creating reminders for that or enabling the ability to set reminders for for meditation so i'll pause here and see if you have any questions for me yeah i think if i were to put myself in the shoes of a rookie these are all great solutions um what are some reasons why you didn't pick the support

group or the scoreboard yeah that's a great question i think primarily uh because it probably requires more thought uh you know like thinking and also design for example live meetings would require us to not only curate different groups uh and individuals perhaps there's time zone uh challenges here perhaps there's a number of people who may need to opt in to these type of of groups also depending on our ability we may have to we may have to decide to create the technology behind the live meetings or perhaps outsource it or partner with you know google

meet or zoom that may be costly as well so it just seemed like a higher effort not necessarily suggesting that it's lower impact and so in in some regard i did have a bit of a bias for action and a bias for lower effort uh solutions but that's not to say the other two should not be further explored got it um great so um definitely great solutions and i really think that your pain points highlighted some real pain points that rookies have when it comes to meditating so overall this was a really solid answer um

thanks or for your time on today's mock interview i'll definitely give you some feedback on my end um and also afterwards i'd love it if you can give some feedback also so some things i've written down was that you your pain points and your solutions were very creative and uh very spot-on for someone who's a rookie like i said if i were to put myself in the shoes of a rookie these are um mutually exclusive paintballs that you picked out and there they were also very um ones that i i agree with the intuition that

you gave you also did a great job of pausing to give me the space to ask clarifying questions um so it's uh it shows that you have good communication skills i also saw that you know like when i asked you some questions you you generally show that you're excited about the problem and that really helps to bring this positive energy to an interview where you know as an interviewer maybe i'm just going about my day at work and then randomly i have to come and interview someone for a job and it might not be the

most exciting thing but you just being able to bring your your excitement for headspace as an app definitely um is very positive for an interview so that's very good and you also did a really good job of prioritizing at each step so thinking about which user which pain point which solution you gave a really good um prioritization into which one you would pick so that's better than just kind of hand wavy like oh you know i would pick this because of my intuition um i think the one thing that i would mention is that i

think at the very end when i asked what you why you you might not have picked the support groups and scoreboard um and you spoke about the effort that's that's definitely true i would probably also spend some time and talk about how some of the difficulties around building a two-sided marketplace right if you have support groups or if you have a scoreboard definitely definitely need that sort of two-sided uh group users to come um and be like maybe the supporter or maybe um building that community also takes a lot of effort um all in all

great answer and i'm wondering if you might have any self feedback or any advice that you might want to give the audience yeah thanks a lot kevin for the feedback uh plus one on on the improvement side uh should have definitely be more conscious of that perhaps i would also add i think in the beginning you you asked me to clarify the engagement side of things so i think it's really important not to assume engagement is defined because really the definition of engagement is dynamic depending on the situation depending on the app so perhaps i

could have done a better job articulating that um i think also in terms of the user profile i could have perhaps done a little bit a better job here because i did talk about addressable market but if you if i really want to be critical with myself the bigger address of the market are those that are not using headspace at all so perhaps i could have chose that um as well if i'm if i'm putting that as a prioritization criteria but yeah overall this was fun uh great conversation with you and um i hope maybe

we can do it again sometime of course and i know that you don't know this but i remember once i did watch a talk by i think his name he's a co-founder of amplitude which is an analytics app that a lot of companies use to track metrics and behavior from users i think one of their customers is calm which is a competitor to headspace and if i remember correctly the success story that i'd heard from the co-founder of amplitude is that they discovered that if they have reminders for users to meditate this would increase the

likelihood that the user would have that aha moment of hey like this is a valuable product so i know that that's something that you did not know before going into today's mock interview um but i just thought i'd bring that up because it aligns with the ultimate solution that you landed on so maybe it's a coincidence maybe you have a very good intuition there but all in all great answer and for the audience for the viewers watching at home good luck with your upcoming pm [Music] interview