# Example: Improve YouTube

**Prompt:** "How would you improve YouTube?"

## Why this is a strong example

This example works because it does not treat "YouTube" as one giant undifferentiated product. It narrows the target user, picks one pain point, and earns the final MVP choice through explicit tradeoffs.

## Condensed Walkthrough

### 1. Clarify

- Scope the product to the core YouTube viewing experience rather than Shorts, Music, or TV.
- Clarify whether the focus is viewers, creators, or advertisers.
- If the interviewer does not answer, assume the full ecosystem is in scope but commit to prioritizing one player.

### 2. Rationale

- Online video is a massive attention market with intense competition.
- The deeper issue is not just watch time; it is whether users feel their time was well spent.
- YouTube's unique advantage is the breadth of creator supply across learning, entertainment, and niche content.
- Thesis: recommendation quality is optimized for engagement more than intentional satisfaction.

### 3. Product Goal

Help viewers consistently find content they are glad they watched, so that YouTube becomes a platform people choose intentionally rather than habitually.

### 4. Segmentation

**Ecosystem players:**

- Viewers
- Creators
- Advertisers
- Talent managers / networks
- Moderation and trust teams

**Chosen player:** viewers

**Primary dimension:** viewing intent

- Goal-directed learning
- Entertainment browsing
- Deep-dive research

**Chosen segment:** goal-directed learners

**Secondary dimension:** expertise level

- Beginners
- Intermediate
- Advanced

**Chosen segment:** beginners

**Persona:** Priya is a 28-year-old marketing coordinator using YouTube to learn practical work skills quickly. She cares about finding trustworthy, well-structured content without wasting time in low-signal recommendation loops.

### 5. Pain Points

**Journey stages:**

- Search
- Selection
- In-session learning
- Follow-through

**Key pain points:**

- No clear starting point for a topic
- Quality is hard to judge before clicking
- Too many similar-looking tutorials
- Old content outranks better current content
- Recommendations pull the user off task
- No structured progression from one concept to the next
- No record of learning progress

**Top pain point:** no structured progression

- **Frequency:** shows up in almost every learning session after the first video
- **Severity:** blocks the job to be done because skill-building requires sequence, not random adjacent content

### 6. Solution

**Option 1:** Learning Paths that sequence the best beginner videos into a guided curriculum.

**Option 2:** Intent-Aware Recommendations that hold the session to the user's stated learning goal.

**Option 3:** Key Moments Index that lets users jump directly to the concept they need inside each video.

**Comparison:**

- Learning Paths: **High user impact** - directly solves progression. **High effort** - ranking, sequencing, and new UI.
- Intent-Aware Recommendations: **Medium user impact** - reduces distraction. **Medium effort** - recommendation-system changes.
- Key Moments Index: **Medium user impact** - improves efficiency inside videos. **Medium effort** - transcript and chapter labeling work.

**MVP winner:** Learning Paths

**Core features:**

- Topic-based path of 5-8 sequenced videos
- Progress tracking across sessions
- "Continue learning" re-entry point

**v1 exclusions:**

- No quizzes
- No creator-submitted path editing

**Closing line:**

"I'd focus on beginner goal-directed learners, specifically around the pain of no structured progression, and build Learning Paths as the first bet."

## What to notice

- The goal is an outcome, not a feature
- The segment is narrow enough to matter
- The pain point is a user friction, not a missing capability
- The final MVP is chosen after comparison, not announced from intuition alone
