If I were product manager at Zoom
Introduction
This blog is an attempt to understand Zoom’s business model and its product offerings. It also contains few interesting ideas which could add significant value to Zoom. All suggestions are based on analysis of information available in public domain.
Company Overview
Zoom is a cloud based videotelephony software program developed by Zoom Video Communications in 2011. The company was founded by former Cisco WebEx (Cisco’s video conferencing offering) engineer Eric Yuan and started offering its video conferencing service under Zoom Cloud Video in early 2013. This tool allows users to virtually interact with each other through audio, video, and chat.
Zoom took off among the masses when people found Zoom and its free plan satisfied their remote working needs when the coronavirus pandemic which caused the shutting down of all businesses. Social distancing and distant socializing became a norm and thanks we had few good communication tools like Zoom to keep us connected. Almost everyone downloaded Zoom to make group video calls to family, friends and classmates during lockdown period.
Zoom follows the freemium business model. Zoom offers 4 different subscription plans, including free plan. The free plan provides a video chatting service that allows up to 100 participants concurrently, with a 40-minute time restriction. Users have the option to upgrade by subscribing to a paid plan, with the highest allowing up to 1,000 participants concurrently, with a 30-hour time restriction.
According to a report by Sensortower, Zoom registered almost 131 million new installs in the month of April which is almost 60X growth when compared to April 2019.
Other products the company has developed are:
· Zoom Phone, a cloud phone system that comes with features such as intelligent call routing, automated attendants, voicemails, dialing personas, call recording, and many more.
· Zoom Video Webinars, a conferencing tool that allows businesses to easily conduct large online events with audio, video, and screen sharing.
· An app marketplace, where existing customers can install third-party applications such as HubSpot, Slack, or Trello to enhance the functionality of the product experience.
Business Model
Zoom earns most of its revenue from offering subscription plans with varying features.
Zoom offers 4 subscription plans for its users called Zoom Basic, Zoom Pro, Zoom Business, and Zoom Enterprise.
Here is how these plans vary depending on their offerings:
Zoom Basic: The Basic plan of Zoom is free to use and it permits its users to have up to 100 members in a single meeting, unlimited 1 to 1 meeting, online customer care services, and some extra features for group meetings. The main restriction in its free plan is that the duration of group video meetings is constrained to 40 mins.
Zoom Pro: The Pro Plan of Zoom comes at $14 per month and persists all the features provided by the free plan alongside added advantages, like, — group video call duration increased to twenty-four hours as opposed to 40 minutes, the capacity to add more than 100 members, integration with Skype for Business and a lot more other feature.
Zoom Business: The Zoom Business plan comes at $19.99 per month and needs at least ten group members in your team to function. As the name suggests, this plan is more appropriate for small or medium-sized businesses.
Zoom Enterprise: The Zoom Enterprise plan comes at $19.99 per month and needs at least 50 members in your team. Again, as the name suggests, it is a great fit for large businesses and organizations.
My Recommendations
The following are few suggestions which could help improve product offerings for OYO.
· Live events: During live events, MS teams gives us feature to scroll back in the time and listen/ watch if we missed or joined the event late. This is very useful feature as you do not miss any important discussion and can revisit earlier conversation. Zoom should implement this feature as I find is very useful.
· Background blur: Although Zoom provide feature to add custom backgrounds, but blur feature is really cool and we don’t have to worry about selecting background images. I think it will be cool feature to add in Zoom.
· Filtering on participants in large meetings: In case of large meetings with 100 people, there should be feature to filter / sort the participants by name, hand-up, joining time, dropped out etc so that attendance can be tracked wherever it is required.
· Copy Chat Content: This is frustrating feature which does not allow you to copy past the content of chat window. In practical world this is very much required when the presenter is sharing some command/ URL or some thing for us to check and we must just type it again. This should be enabled.
