hello everyone kentucky from the rocketblocks team here in this mock interview video we're sitting down with alan yang who is currently the head of product management at bubble which is a popular no code development tool before that he was a product manager at google where he focused on their productivity apps including docs sheets and slides in today's mock interview video we're going to sit down and ask alan the classic product management interview question what is your favorite product and why so let's go ahead and take a look at how he answers this is tell me
a little bit about your favorite product why is it your favorite product and uh you know one or two improvements that you would go ahead and make to that particular product if you could yeah sure um so i would love to talk about venmo um i mentioned vemmo because i think it is just a really um elegantly designed solution to a particular particular problem um so the the use case for vemo is really like transferring i would say like smaller or more like day-to-day amounts of money between people um this is kind of distinct from
the use case of like transferring larger amounts or like paying larger bills so like for that you have like wires and you know like auto pay from your bank account things like that but the use case venmo is trying to tackle is really like you know day to day you're interacting with people um and maybe you're like splitting a meal maybe you have a roommate and you need to split expenses with them um and venmo tackles that particular use case pretty well so if we think about like the target user of this um you know
it's it's definitely not kind of like an enterprise b2b kind of a product it's it's really for people who might be engaging with other peers on a more frequent basis so i would guess that their user base possibly screw skews a little bit younger um so for example college students are like constantly interacting with peers probably splitting costs things like that um it's you know i would even maybe go a step further on the filtering and say like this is not really even a tool that you would necessarily use with like your your partner or
your spouse right because like those folks probably have like joint bank accounts or something like that so um yeah it's it's really for folks who are like interacting with friends or peers in those kinds of um situations um and you would use it when you need to again like split some kind of cost or like a meal or maybe you need to pay somebody back because you're in some kind of like a called like a roommate relationship any kind of relationship um so uh that's the target use case and uh again the reason i chose
mmo is that the product just seems to fulfill that use case like very well and i appreciate like the simple uh design i don't mean simple and pejorative way but uh they just like fulfill it very well um so you know at its core you can transfer money digitally from one person on memo to another person um you can connect demo to a bank account so that you are able to easily like sweep money from your venmo balance into your bank account if you don't have enough money to pay somebody on demo it'll automatically withdraw
it from your bank um it's all pretty seamless and you know they make the ui pretty clear about like where the money is coming from you know where the money is going things like that you can find people pretty easily you have the choice of username i think even phone number um i think even now they have like this little qr code so that if you happen to be in person you can kind of like scan the other person's qr code yep um so it's great uh even for situations where like you're not physically with
the person of course um and yeah it does exactly what you need it it literally just transfers the money into another um they obviously have like other features um i will say that the social side of venmo is not something that i think is really core would be my guess i'm not fully sure what the thinking was behind it i think it's been there for a while um because having like a social feed of publicly visible payments is not something i would have thought is necessarily super tied to the core use case but i know
that they used to run some kind of a referral campaign where you know you get a dollar if you refer a friend or something like that and like if you publicly post that on a feed that can kind of build um a little bit of buzz um yeah so those are all things i guess i liked about it and you also asked for one improvement i think um thinking about you know some of the use cases i mentioned um there there are sort of like the one-off payment use cases like splitting a meal at a
restaurant um but i think demo is also being used by a lot of folks in a target demographic to split recurring expenses so um i would uh if if i were working on memo i would perhaps think about looking into that idea like how can you better facilitate recurring transfers from one person to another and what's an example of like the type of recurring transfers you would think of that are an example of sort of these a recurring transfer that would happen in a casual non-business relationship yeah so like roommate splitting rent is kind of
a big example in my head um or like any other kind of like apartment related recurring you know expense that's the same amount every month um you would uh you know if you think about the user experience you would probably want to do things like you know show somebody a warning a couple days before recurring expense is about to pop um maybe you have an option of like um adjusting the amount um one off or something like that um you know i don't think it's like the next frontier of payments but i think it's a
potentially like a very utilitarian feature that kind of like ties well with uh some of the use cases for them yeah cool um yeah i could i could definitely see that making sense i i remember the pain of just sort of constantly writing out a check to my my friend who is like paying the sort of uh rent on behalf of me and roommates for years so i know that well uh just a few quick follow-up questions on some of the elements you mentioned so i think at the beginning you sort of said venmo is
is quite sort of elegant at what it does and i'm curious if you think about paypal is sort of one alternate option square cache is another alternate option um what is it about venmo for you that's sort of special or or you know sort of beats it out in your mind that you would you would go with venmo versus some of those other options yeah that's that's a great question um because i think at least today i believe you're right that those um those other products have basically the same feature set where you can accomplish
the same goal um i'm going to guess that uh the the ui and ux4 demo does seem a little bit i'll say like smoother or more modern or maybe like more mobile-first compared to um paypal at least that's i have had some experience with paypal um i bet that makes a little bit of difference but might not explain like you know the market shares necessarily i i would honestly bet that the difference in popularity might be just like their histories and how they went to market um like it feels like venmo pursued kind of a
mobile first strategy and went after a particular like age range of users like especially in the college uh sort of demographic um and that's great because like you know that is a market where you can spread a little bit more virally because you have all these college students who are like oh do you have the mode you have mm whereas like paypal i think began almost more in like an ebay kind of context or make like you know maybe like one person paying a business kind of a context um and square uh also kind of
there's some kind of like b to b or b to small business kind of uh root there um so i don't know history too well but yeah that's a good question yeah i think your insight around go to market probably explains a lot of that difference like i i remember uh seeing sort of venmo as it came out and my my default application to solve that use case before that had been paypal and ben mo i think their big pitch at the time was was two things that i recall at least one was it's designed
for mobile first and it especially at that time the venmo mobile experience was much better than paypal on mobile i think paypal's catch up caught up i actually never use paypal on my phones i'm not really sure and i think square cash from like a mobile perspective like my senses that ui is pretty nice um uh so i think that was one thing was they just came out with mobile first at a time where paypal was caught flat-footed on that so i agree with you there and then i i think that social feed thing as
well you alluded to this earlier may have created buzz and appealed to a younger demographic or at the very least sort of just created buzz around it like oh hey like i i just connected my account and realized like i've got a bunch of friends using it too um and you know so maybe everyone's on here and i think that probably helped a lot cool cool okay you
