Prioritize upgrades to Amazon Photos, the unlimited photo backup bundled with Prime
Company: Amazon
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Amazon Photos comes with a Prime membership. Members can store as many photos as they like at full quality, with no compression or other loss of quality, and they also get 5 GB of storage for videos. Anyone who wants more video space can pay for one of several storage tiers. As the product manager, how would you improve Amazon Photos?
```hint Once storage is solved
Unlimited full-quality photo storage is a strong promise, and it changes what the hard problem is. When keeping photos costs nothing, what still goes wrong for the people taking them?
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What should the improvement mainly serve: getting more Prime members to start using Photos, deeper engagement from existing users, or more upgrades to the paid video tiers?
- Which platforms are in scope: the mobile app, the desktop and web experience, or all of them?
- Is there any data on why Prime members who know about Photos do not use it, or why existing users stop?
- Should improvements be judged by how much they add to the value of Prime, rather than by Photos as a standalone product?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal tied to why Amazon bundles Photos with Prime (membership value and retention) and to the paid video tiers.
- A clear choice among the people who store photos, such as parents of young children, enthusiast photographers, casual phone users or people switching from another cloud service, with a reason.
- Pain points that remain once photo storage is unlimited: getting photos in, finding and curating large libraries, sharing, and the 5 GB video limit.
- Prioritized solutions with explicit trade-offs and a defined MVP.
- Metrics with guardrails such as storage cost and privacy.
### Follow-up Questions
- Every extra upload costs Amazon storage. How would you weigh that cost for a feature that drives many more uploads?
- How would you measure whether your improvement reduces Prime cancellations?
- How would you prevent a family member's photos of a child from being shared more widely than that parent intended?
Overview: A product improvement question about Amazon Photos, the Prime benefit with unlimited full-quality photo storage, 5 GB of video space and paid video tiers. It tests segment selection, pain points beyond storage, prioritized solutions with an MVP, and metrics tied to Prime value.
