Sample questions and my approach to providing quality answers.

Surbhi B Sooni

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Product Coalition

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6 min read

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Jun 9, 2022

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1. How would you change the Amazon Fresh experience and how would you measure them?

Let’s first talk about the assumptions.

Amazon Fresh is an e-commerce site that allows users to shop for their daily groceries. Customers can access Amazon Fresh through the Amazon.com home page that directs them to the Amazon Fresh shopping catalogue. The delivery of these fresh items is usually done the same day or earliest.

Amazon Fresh is available both on the web and mobile. I would like to consider web experience. The first reason is that customers prefer mob to place grocery items and 2nd all major competitors’ traffics are driven on mob too e.g. Big basket, Blinkit, Zepto etc.

I would ask what would you like me to measure? Financial well being, usage, simple tracking metric or only shopping experience.

If “Only shopping experience,” let’s move to solve this problem:

There are some important aspects to consider. Firstly, customer touchpoints that attribute to the success of any daily online grocery experience. I have jotted down a list of experiences at every touch point that the user expects throughout its customer journey.

They are:

1. Quick and easy search of the products
2. Clear, concise product categories
3. Easy navigation across the listed products
4. Visible and quoted marketing promotions, offers, coupons
5. Auto-generated frequent purchase history
6. Price & product information
7. Personalization offerings
8. Flawless checkout experience
9. Flawless payment gateway experience
10. Successful customer’s completion of goals
11. Intuitive offering/coupon options

High-level mapping of customer journey to experiences :

Any bottleneck across these experiences makes a customer unhappy.

There could be potential pain points for Amazon Fresh from points 1 to 11. However, I will only pick 2, 3, 5, and 9 and elaborate. For others, Amazon is a trendsetter as they are part of their overall existing e-Commerce experience at Amazon.com. Whereas 2, 3, 5, and 9 are aligned to the daily grocery experience and improving them will be an edge over competitors in the grocery segment.

Pain points related to 2, 3, 5, 9 mentioned above.

1. Not having clear, concise product categories, subcategories and navigation, is painful for customers. The majority of customers want to see a variety of options in that category so that they can pick one per their budget.
2. Not having a view to see a bucket of options based on their frequent purchases is another hindrance. Many customers don’t want to spend too much time picking repetitive items for their weekly/monthly/daily groceries.
3. If payment is failed and too many steps are involved to verify the failed payment, it is a pain point too.

I will prioritize all the pain points.

Potential solutions to improve these pain points are:

1. Keeping slick product navigation. To increase the experience Amazon Fresh should ensure that customer doesn’t scroll way too down to find the product categories. Product categories should be above all recommendations, marketing flyers or past purchase information. [easy to deliver, high business impact]
2. Considering having a separate Amazon Fresh app altogether. Currently Fresh is a sub-category (L2) of the main menu “groceries and pet supplies”. It may break the experience of the user who couldn’t able to locate Amazon Fresh on the mob app. [high effort, high business impact]
3. Alternative to point 2 is to make the Amazon Fresh primary menu title than the submenu. [easy to deliver, high business impact]
4. Payment failure notification or order cancelled or failed notification should be accessible on amazon’s fresh page. Currently, users can access the order information by going back to the main Amazon.com home page where all orders including Amazon.com are stored collectively under the order section. [easy to deliver, high business impact]

5) Categorize the past purchases view than keeping them as an open list view. This will give users not to scroll way too down to see the past purchase. [easy to deliver, high business impact]

Prioritization

I will prioritize 1, 3, 4, and 5 solutions as they are easy to deliver and would show good impact as well.

Metrics

To measure the success of these changes experiences. There are some actionable metrics.

• No of the time customers access the product in less than 2 clicks
• % of Successful cart to checkout
• No of the times successful re-payment within an hr
• Reduction in checking the cancelled order status
• Track Customer rating (CSAT) for different touch points (category, navigation, search, payment, order etc)
• Frequency of repeat customers
• No of the times search bar used over finding product through product category < Bigger the value, there is huge scope to improve the product category & navigation>

What would be your strategy to bring partners onto the Facebook platform for Black Friday?

Some of the clarifying assumptions to start with:

1. What is the purpose? Is it to increase the user base of seller partners or promote Facebook as a unique selling and buying platform? I will assume it is to increase seller partners numbers on Black Friday.
2. What is geography? I’ll assume India based on my mutual agreement with the interviewer. My thought is around Facebook using “Make in India” aspects to promote and leverage the foundation of small and mid businesses like other competitors Amazon.
3. Partner seller personas: I will take small, and mid-size sellers’ partners.
4. Target seller types: Daily active user who takes some action to engage buyers at least 3+ times in a day, mid active users (once in a day), average active users (weekly once ), inactive (monthly once) and future account holders.

I will define the objective of the strategies and would define the success measures around them.

Objective 1: Promote and advertise Black Friday as one of a kind event of the year.

Strategy:

1. Actively endorse Black Friday on different channels- offline & online
2. Design a theme for Black Friday e.g. promoting small and mid-size businesses of certain product categories etc.
3. Promote, and advertise potential sellers and partners through compelling stories.
4. Partnering with local and offline business promoters such as NGOs who help Meta to bring more community business on board for black Friday (e.g. Delhi hat bazaar, Turkish flee market theme, artesian bakers, top 100 designers entrepreneurs etc.). Currently, on other e-comm platforms, these sellers are accessible through third-party merchandisers with lesser-known facts, brands and lack of marketing.
5. Promote certain types of business that were untouched so far through their online presence as exclusive on Meta Black Friday. e.g Geographical indication (GI) tag products exclusive for import and exclusive places.

Success measures:

• DAU sellers
• Retention
• Sellers page likes & followers Week on week
• Impression/rating/ranking on the sellers’ advertisements
• Sellers referral onboarding
• Volume of active sellers MoM
• Sellers lead pipeline growth

Objective 2: Promote Meta shopping as a virtual fair unlike the common definition of Black Friday

Strategy:

Curtain raiser of Black Friday on metaverse platform as a virtual fair.

Success measures:

• Active users on Black Friday (buyers & Sellers both)
• Average basket size,
• Volume of transactions,
• NPS of black Friday. CSAT, Dsat,
• Bounce rate
• Average user/seller spending time on the platform

Objective 3: Activate, nurture and enable more active sellers

Strategy:

1. Quick and efficient onboarding of the businesses through curated seller onboarding programs. Meta can start a prestigious & unique seller onboard program to educate small and mid-size businesses to learn D2C or ongoing selling techniques through meta platform, e.g. connecting with users, advertising, market segmenting, catalogue creation, blogging, or via Meta pop kiosk. This ongoing program will help to onboard more and more seller partners at a time. It also helps to filter out non-resilient business sellers at a much early stage.
2. Use Meta offline pop-up kiosks to promote top Facebook seller partners throughout the years through awareness and recognition.
3. Promote Meta as the most desirable platform for such small-mid business sellers from onboarding to scaling up.

Success measures:

• Sellers enrollment
• Sellers onboarding turnaround time
• Average revenue
• Ads revenue growth in this segment

To make these strategies work, Facebook has to solve certain pain points of the sellers:

1. Accessibility: Seamless onboarding experience for sellers who don’t even have enough knowledge of the online business.
2. Knowledge: Curated onboarding and educating programs for the sellers.
3. Referrals: Facilitating referrals so that one business generates leads for another.
4. Buyer and seller experience: Outstanding experience from product exploration, demo, customization, shopping, and payment, pricing checkouts through metaverse platform, unlike any other web/mob e-commerce platforms.

Finally, I will pick objectives 1 and 2 in the short term as they are easy to deliver and high business impact. Objective 3 can be long term as it is a mid effort and high business impact.

Enjoy learning!

Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for his valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.