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Prioritizing Google Photos Features

Feature Prioritization · intermediate

As the PM for Google Photos, your team has proposed three high-impact features for the next quarter: enhanced AI-driven photo editing suggestions, a collaborative album creation and sharing tool, and a simplified migration path from other cloud photo services. Given current engineering capacity allows for only one major feature, how would you prioritize?

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Community approaches

Pavlo’s approach

Clarification needed: What are the primary short and long term objectives (the quarter/year) for the product?

What is potential business impact and users experience improvement for each of the proposed features?

  • AI photo editing can increase engagement significantly if the algorithm has proven efficiency on real life tasks. As a result photos sharing rate should also grow up, since users tend to share content they put some effort on. Engagement growth doesn't impacts product revenue directly; users may need to purchase more storage for their content if they start capturing more, but the editing tool doesn't encourage them to do so directly. More specific growth % prediction can be gathered based on the following metrics: DAU of photo editing feature, editing session duration, editing decline (revert) rate, user flow after editing.
  • Collaborative albums and sharing tool can lead to new user acquisition and directly impact revenue growth. Also social aspect of the feature should lead to increased engagement of existing users. More specific impact can be calculated based on current sharing rate, UX effort needed for sharing and collaboration, users acquisition after sharing.
  • Migration feature simplifies product adoption of the new users, which directly leads to the revenue growth. However the technical restrictions of third party services should be considered - is it doable to make the migration smooth and fast from other most popular services or is just simplifies the process a little bit? Also, this feature is tied to marketing effort - are there any marketing activities planned to support the feature, what's the effort/cost? Metrics which show how often users decline to switch from 3d party product because of migration complexity would be helpful, also conversion rate of such users into paid customers is important.

Assuming the engineering effort is similar for all 3 features, I would prioritize collaborative albums and sharing over other features.

Ishant Juyal’s approach

The prioritization of the feature depends on the goal of the company for the next quarter. All these features lead to different impact on the business.

  1. Enhanced AI-driven photo editing suggestions - this will lead to more engagement and people sharing the results, which can help with acquiring new users because they want to see what AI-driven editing feature is all about.
  2. A collaborative album creation and sharing tool leads to more people using your app as they would want to be part of the album too. So, it's for user acquisition
  3. A simple migration path from other cloud photo services to Google Photos is also for acquiring more users and to reduce the friction of moving from some other provider to Google Photos.

For the sake of this question, we'll assume that the goal for next quarter is to acquire more users. In that case, all three are relevant. So, we now look at the impact, how important this problem is for the users and the development effort.

  1. AI driven editing: High reach, Impact - Medium, Effort - High
  2. Collaborative Album: High reach, Impact - High, Effort - Medium
  3. Migration: Low Reach, Impact medium, Effort - Medium

Based on this, the priority should be given to the Collaborative album feature, then AI driven rditing and then Migration.