Curriculum - Should apple go into modular phones?

should apple go into modular phones [Music] hey everyone welcome back to another exponent product management mock interview my name is kevin way and on today's show we have selena we're going to be doing a product strategy type interview question today before we get into that celine celina do you mind telling the audience a little bit about who you are yeah for sure and thanks for having me um hey everyone i'm selena i'm a product manager at google and i've been there about two years now i was in an apm so about four years out of

school great awesome so like i mentioned we're doing a product strategy question today and the question i like to ask is should apple go into modular phones yeah for sure um so i'm just gonna be jotting down some notes and stuff um first i'll just state my assumption on what a modular phone is so i'm assuming it means like users can sort of plug and play with adjustments like a better phone a better battery a better processor okay cool same page then um great so i guess you know there's always a lot of reasons why

apple or whatever company should do something and a lot of reasons why they shouldn't so i want to take a look at this from a few angles one first of all you know what is the user benefit like why would apple want to be doing this for their users two is apple itself like what is the benefit to the company what are the strengths and weaknesses of apple that might you know be for or against this um three would be what is going on outside of apple like sort of the competitive landscape um fourth would

be does this affect any sort of like partnerships um that apple might have today and then i think the last one to keep in mind is just like the overall context of what's going on in the world um if there's anything that you know might lend in favor for this any like regulations that might make it tough based on those five things uh we'll just dive right into it um so the first thing for users is the thing that's top of mind it's like it's better customization like better personalization of a thing you have like

on your person for most of the day um i think you know you can if you're going on vacation you can you know get a better battery for longer battery life you can upgrade your phone like just in preparation of those sorts of special things um the other benefit that comes to mind is it will increase the life cycle of your phone so rather than you know upgrading every cycle to like the iphone you know xs to the iphone like 12 or whatever um you can potentially prevent having to drop a thousand dollars all at

once and maybe more incrementally space out your spending on your device um cool and if there are no questions on that for the second bit um you know on the flip side of the user benefit i think the immediate cost to apple is like maybe they're going to lose money on this um like you can imagine if i'm only ever upgrading the camera once a year instead of a new phone like that has a material impact to the bottom line um i would say that uh as far as the perception of apple goes like it's

it's known as a company whose strength is um you know full stack integration being a very closed ecosystem and i don't necessarily think having much modular phones and having that reputation are mutually exclusive but it's something to keep in mind um as well um let's see and i think another thing to keep in mind from the apple perspective is uh smartphone sales i've seen in the news are declining um in general and for apple and so even though they might be losing money overall if they did this maybe on the flip side there's a way

to actually recoup that cost by selling you know more parts one-off maybe they're able to make up for lost ground there um and so we would want to do a little bit more analysis to figure that out but at a high level i think you get my drift um any questions so far so for for what these things that you're mentioning like i said i think this is a very thoughtful framework do you think these things apply to all apple customers or maybe specific demographics yeah i think um in general i'm glad you brought that

up apple has a user base that's pretty tech savvy that's pretty high income um and so i would imagine that if they were to do this like the mods themselves like would still be pretty expensive um so uh i don't think it would necessarily be for like a quote-unquote low-end apple user since most apple users are just by definition like a little bit more into like the luxury brands got it cool yeah let's continue awesome um all right so the third uh the third bucket was the competitive landscape um and so as far as i

know there's no other major company doing this today um like you know you can think of google with their pixels samsung you know xiaomi i don't i'm not aware of anything with those major competitors um so you know the upside for apple there is they would be the first to market with something you know new like this uh the other side of that coin is they would be the first to market with something like this and you know sometimes you don't want to you don't want to be too early for what the market is ready

for so um so that's something to keep in mind as well um another thing to keep in mind is this might open uh other channels for um competition like you know on amazon you can buy knockoff iphone chargers i could see the potential for you know other brands doing like oh like knock off you know iphone you know iphone attachments like iphone camera attachments like that sort of stuff already kind of exists even today um and so the fourth bucket if there are no questions there were um sort of like the partners that are involved

and i think again like going back to the fact that apple is a pretty like closed ecosystem they're very like self-reliant fully integrated i can't think of any major partnerships that would be hurt by this um the reason i call that is if you imagine say google doing something like this since they're you know very closely related to android and many many oems that are running android um i could see uh i could see a source of tension from say like samsung if they knew pixel was you know potentially prolonging the life cycle of their

devices samsung might not be happy because that takes away opportunities from them so uh apple's actually in a pretty good position here they don't have to worry about as much as that since they are very closed um and cool like the last the last one was about the macro level context of what's going on i think you know what you see in the news that's top of mind for big companies is like you know the like the monopoly sort of you know legal discussions and like you know quote unquote big tech and how we might

manage that and you know politics aside i don't see that necessarily um hurting this proposal to be honest because if anything as i mentioned like this would open up channels for other people to potentially like have a have a third party hack um for like a you know iphone mod um the second thing i will call out here is um one one reason for the pro column is as the workforce for these you know tech savvy higher income earning folks are becoming increasingly remote i could see the demand for something that's a little more powerful

in your pocket to go higher right if i'm like you know working from new york and then working from hawaii and you know visiting my family in in europe um i don't necessarily want to bring a big laptop around if i can you know simply plug into a monitor and you know have have a bluetooth keyboard on my iphone like that could be um maybe something in our future um so i'll pause there if there are any questions on any of the five buckets no questions here um what would your recommendation be yeah glad you

asked so i i'll sort of do a quick summary on if each of these buckets are like a pro pro like negative or neutral um and then make my final recommendation so for the first one i think it's a pretty obvious pro like it gives users and consumers more choice more flexibility the opportunity to save money um so that's that for two which is um about apple and the company itself i think it's it's leaning towards a negative um because even though you can always price something such that you aren't losing money i think it

would have to be such a high price where a user would rather just like buy a new phone um and then to another point we were talking about earlier i think they're just known for being like integrated and the fact that they would veer away from that story by selling modular parts doesn't really fit with their brand and would be a pretty big departure um so i'm gonna call that a con for now i think for three um it's it's pretty neutral right it's like you could be the first one out there and like fall

flat on your face because the market's not ready for it but then again people said the same thing about the ipod so this is um you know this is this is not a strong reason to do it and so i think if there's not a strong reason to do it from this perspective like you wouldn't want to waste the resources on it so i'll call it like a neutral for now for the fourth which is collaborators um i think again this would be a pro because they don't have to they don't have to keep in

mind all the partners external partners because again like the fully integrated stack the closed ecosystem and for last uh the context bucket um i think while there are some you know mild pros here like the work from home and like that being sort of where the trends are going i don't think that modular phones are necessarily the only way that apple could achieve this like for example they could just sell like the work from home iphone that is just like a computer like a better a way better processor with everything the same like it doesn't

have to be a mod for them to achieve that same goal so i'm going to call this a neutral and so if i sum up the pros are in the user benefit and the collaborators and there's one pretty big con for the company and so even though there's technically more pros and cons i think that the weight of the pro for collaborative collaborators is small because that's just sort of how the company is run it's not anything particularly particularly unique to the modular phone question and so it really comes down to one verse two like

does the user benefit outweigh the potential hit for the company and um ultimately i think no uh apple should not get into modular phones because um one this is a departure from their brand and what they've built themselves to be you know this luxury integrated system and you know while users could have more customization and flexibility i think again this is not the only way apple could achieve this um even though modular phones is a solution it's not the only solution and so um like we don't have to go into this area in order to

achieve that goal yeah i i think i that's a good reasoning i agree with you there um so i'll take off my interviewer hat now and maybe we can get into some reflection or um discussion about the the question so i definitely see your thought process here i think it was very clear and at the end of the day apple wants to have a great user experience and they want their products to be ready out of the box you think about airpods and when you pair them it's like a very easy one-tap solution whereas you

know if they were to have users assemble their own phone or do anything like that i think there would be a little bit more thought required from the users and all in all though i think this was a great answer from you the one thing that i really liked was that you called out knockoff parts that could be sold on amazon i think that was a good consideration that you called out and like i mentioned your framework was very thoughtful and you not only laid out the different pros and cons but also you discuss the

weights that you assign to them so yeah i really enjoyed this mock interview with you i'd love to hear any thoughts from your end or any tips you might have for the audience specifically for these kind of strategy questions yeah um well thanks for the feedback i appreciate it um i think uh important things to know and things that are helpful as i go through this is definitely like being really explicit with the buckets that you choose like it doesn't have to be this five but i think ultimately like you should definitely touch on the

user because at the core of the core of anything a pm does it's like how does it benefit the user um i think the company is pretty important to touch onto like what are the strengths what are the weaknesses um and i think three four and five could all technically be lumped as one sort of like macro bucket like what else is going on outside of the immediate scope so however you feel comfortable dividing and conquering is great but touching on those three main things is important um this this blend of buckets is an adaptation

adaptation of the five c's if you've heard of that one um i know like the swat framework and others are also popular but um again i think those three buckets are the best to touch on yeah and this is a good approach i mean in general these strategy questions could be spun any number of ways right today we asked should apple get into modular phones but this question easily could have been should uber get into some new market um and i think the approach here um is one that you can carry with you and the

learnings here still apply um all in all thanks for your time today and for the audience at home good luck with your upcoming pm [Music] interview