Product sense: build a product that helps people improve their cooking skills

Design an app whose purpose is to make the people who use it better cooks. Explain which cooks you would build it for, what keeps them from improving today, what the first version of the app would do and how you would know it is actually working. ```hint Pin down "better" A better cook might have a wider repertoire, get more reliable results, cook with more confidence or waste less food. Decide which of these your chosen users want most; that choice should drive both the features and how you measure success. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is success judged only by whether users' cooking improves, or is there also a business target such as engagement, subscriptions or revenue? - Which market comes first? Cuisines, staple ingredients and kitchen setups differ widely between countries. - Is this limited to a phone app, or can the product use the phone's camera while cooking, voice assistants or connected kitchen devices such as scales? - Should it serve people who barely cook at all, or people who already cook regularly and want to get better? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A concrete, observable definition of "better cook" tied to a chosen user segment, with the reasoning for picking that segment - Pain points specific to learning to cook, such as no feedback while cooking, recipes that assume skills, and uncertainty about amounts and doneness, and why free recipes and videos leave them unsolved - A prioritized first version whose features close the gap between following a recipe and building skill, with trade-offs such as live human coaching versus scalable automated guidance - Success metrics that capture skill growth and real cooking rather than time spent in the app, plus guardrails - Risks such as kitchen safety, food allergies and content cost, and how the product sustains itself ### Follow-up Questions - A cooking-skills app succeeds when users need it less. How would you keep the product healthy if your most improved users stop opening it? - How would the app tell whether a user's cooking actually improved, rather than only that they viewed more recipes? - If you added live sessions with professional cooks, how would you price them and keep their quality consistent?