Zoom Product Sense: Making Live Video Lessons Easier for Teachers to Run

You are a product manager at Zoom. Many teachers run their live online classes on Zoom, a general-purpose video meeting product, and teaching a class asks different things of the tool than hosting a meeting does. Improve the experience for these teachers: decide which teachers to focus on, find where the current experience falls short for them, and propose and prioritize changes. ```hint A class is not a meeting Compare a teacher's job before, during and after a lesson with a meeting host's job. Where does the teacher need to do something a meeting host never has to? ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which teachers should we focus on: school teachers, university lecturers, or independent tutors and course creators? Their class sizes, student ages and buying process differ. - Are the classes fully remote, or hybrid with some students in the room and others on video? - Is the goal to grow paid education accounts, keep schools from switching to a competing tool, or raise satisfaction among teachers already on Zoom? - Should the solution live entirely inside Zoom, or connect to the school's learning management system and gradebook? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A chosen teacher segment with a reason, instead of designing for every educator at once. - Pain points across the whole lesson: preparation, running the class, keeping students engaged, managing group work, and follow-up such as attendance and assessment. - A handful of concrete solutions prioritized by impact and effort, with one developed in enough detail to picture. - Success metrics tied to teaching and participation, with guardrails on call reliability and student privacy. - Risks specific to education, such as data about minors, students feeling watched, and teachers with little time to learn new tools. ### Follow-up Questions - How would you measure whether students are engaged without making them feel surveilled? - Schools buy software through administrators, but teachers use it every day. How does that change your roadmap and how you prove value? - What would you cut if you had to ship something useful before the next school term starts?