Interview Question: Zoom PM

Why would we build this?

How would we set goals for this product?

What would be our success metrics?

1. Assumptions

Freemium model with limitations

Publicly traded, independent company

Just the video product

2. Product Rationale

Company Mission: Make video meetings frictionless

Competition: gMeet, facetime, messenger, slack, teams

Why does this exist?

• Allows people to connect and collaborate globally
• Provides best in class video conferencing with low latency/lag, high resolution, ability to handle large volume of concurrent users, good built in tools
• Has huge install base with lots of integrations already with productivity products

Weaknesses/Threats?

• Return To Office
• Commoditized over time
• Doesn't have other offerings (e.g., teams, gMeet) so could lose to integrated and bundled solutions

Product lifecycle stage? Mature / potentially declining; need to focus on retention and monetization

3. Entities

Meetings

• Group meetings
• 1x1 meetings
• 1x many live stream events

Business users: enterprise, SMBs, schools

Business Admin / purchasers

Consumers

4. Objectives

1. Keep users connected and collaborating online

2. Continue having best in class video tool

3. Make online collaboration easier and more effective with additional tools and features

Provide easy to use integrations

5. Potential Metrics

Monetization

• # of paid licenses
• $ per license
• ARR

Potential north star

• # of person meeting hours (ties together # of people and usage per person)
• # of people * meetings
• # of meetings
• DAUs (most directly tied to # of licenses)

Usage

• Meetings / DAU
• Hours / DAU (ties to willingness to pay and $ per license)
• Hours / Meeting
• # of people per meeting

Retention rates

• hours
• DAUs
• Recurring revenue retention rate
• License retention rate
• Meeting minutes / licensed user
• # of meetings attended / licensed user

Frictionless, high quality tech

• Latency/lag, availability, resolution (p50, p99)
• % meetings successfully started / attempted starts
• Customer support ticket volume
• Integrations with partners
• # of people that start a meeting through another platform
• % of meetings started through another platform

6. North Star Metric

# of person meeting hours

7. Leading indicators / Secondary Success Metrics

# of DAUs

Hours / DAU

% of meetings that use white board or other features

Latency/lag, availability, resolution (p50, p99)

8. Health / Guardrail Metrics

Retention rates for hours, DAUs

9. Tradeoff questions

# of person meeting hours dropped 10% last month. What do you do?

• Clarification
• Was it immediate or a trend? immediate
• Yoy? Yes
• sequential? Yes
• Internal questions
• People having less meetings? yes
• Are people creating less meetings? no
• Are we seeing more meeting creation failures? yes
• Did we release a code change that might have impacted it? Yes, it looks like we released a code change that created a bug for 10% of users that prevents them from creating new meetings.
• External questions (skip)
• Actions
• Rollback new version
• Write correction of errors
• Marketing communication on Tier 1 outage