Take notes with Gemini

Helping people who missed the meeting: Increasing usage

Contextual nudges to turn on notes was the first growth experiment for Meet's flagship AI feature, Take Notes for Me. This features usage was called out by Sundar in recent earnings call.

It performs twice as well as general feature promos and has led to double digit increase in people turning on notes.

2x the click through rate

Twice as many people engage with this promo vs a standard one for the same feature

Double-digit increase in usage

Directly drove an over 15% increase in overall feature usage

But it started as a much larger, completely different feature.

The announcement

In August 2023, Google Meet announced the feature "Attend for Me" at Google Cloud NEXT. It attracted a lot of attention, as people were intrigued by the promise of having less meetings.

Headline from Verge saying Google Meets new AI will be able to go to meetings for you

Picture reddit comment saying that 'I live in Japan, where poitnless meetings are a national pastime. They will never embrace it, but this would be a godsend!

The problem

The problem was, there was a big difference between what was announced and what we were going to launch anytime soon. Almost a year after the announcement, we still hadn't launched anything. The team was getting stressed and antsy, I was tasked with creating a plan for how we could launch and continuously improve.

Grounding in the core problem

I hadn't previously been working in this area, so I started by grounding myself, and then the team in the core problem we are trying to solve.

People in office space wearing happy maskys

People waste time in irrelevant meetings due to FOMO

Man looking at a large person made of paper

When they do miss a meeting, catching up is time consuming

Man melting flat over the back of his desk chair

This leads to fatigue and lower productivity

Creating a plan

After aligning on the problem, I spent the next few weeks working with the team on a proposal for how we could solve the user problem immediately, and then continuously improve over time. The plan clearly laid out how we could start by being helpful with a nudge to hosts when somebody marked "attend for me" in calendar.

Then we could move on to being helpful and personalized, then finally being helpful, personalized and proactive.

I presented the proposal to leadership to positive feedback. A few weeks later, we launched the host nudge. When a user marks "No" as an rsvp, and the meeting starts, the host is automatically notified to turn on the notes.

Returning to the core problem and reassessing

The host nudges were extremely successful in getting people to turn on notes more often, and in people feeling more secure in saying "no" to a meeting. Soon after that, we got new product leadership. Since we had clear milestones laid out, it was easy for them to take a look at our plan, and decide that it wasn't the right time to invest towards getting to "personalized" or "personalized and proactive."

By grounding ourselves in the core problem, our team made immediate impact, and make and informed decision about when to pause.

previously:

Working in AI

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