Conceiving the Post-Smartphone Product: A Five-to-Seven-Year Product Vision

You are a product manager asked to design a product that takes over the role the smartphone plays in people's lives within the next five to seven years. Explain what the product is, who would switch to it first and why, and how it would come to displace the phone. ```hint Unbundle the phone List the jobs a smartphone does today and the ones it does poorly. A successor rarely wins by doing everything at once; it wins by doing a few of those jobs much better. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Can the product be hardware, software or a combination, and must it match every phone function on day one or can it take over gradually? - Should it build on the company's existing devices and services, or should I assume a clean slate? - Does the five-to-seven-year window mean the product launches by then, or that it has displaced the phone for its target users by then? - Should I target consumers, business users, or both? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A breakdown of what people use phones for today and where the phone falls short, such as attention locked to a screen, fragility, and having to hold and carry it. - A chosen first-adopter segment with a specific reason they would switch. - A concrete concept whose technology bet is plausible within five to seven years, with honesty about what still has to improve (battery, displays, speech and on-device AI). - A transition path: coexisting with the phone, an ecosystem and developer story, and privacy for both users and bystanders. - Success metrics, guardrails and the biggest risks. ### Follow-up Questions - If your product includes an always-available camera, how do you protect the privacy of the people around the user? - What would you ship in the first year so the product earns real usage before the full vision is feasible? - At the end of year two, which signals would tell you to double down or to stop?