Three features I would add If I was a Product Manager at WhatsApp

WhatsApp currently has over 3 billion monthly active users (as of 2025). Among them are people who check their phones first thing in the morning, sometimes to read a message from their loved ones, or sometimes to see that “Your loan has been approved” notification from their loan apps.

Over the years, WhatsApp has evolved remarkably. From simple chats to video calls, statuses and channels. The app’s end-to-end encryption ensures privacy, which means you can comfortably gossip about your boss without worrying that someone else might see the message, even though everyone is on the same app.

But as good as WhatsApp has evolved, there are still some pain points users experience while using the app, and I’ve come up with a few features that can help solve these problems.

1. Voice Note Summarizer

Imagine you are attending a meeting on a WhatsApp group, and while everyone is sending texts to voice out their opinions, someone will just come out of nowhere and send a 10-minute voice note just to express their thoughts. Using 10 minutes to listen to the voice note can be really exhausting. Before you know it, others will follow suit by sending more and more voice notes.

It starts to feel like a huge burden when you have about five 15-minute voice notes just to catch up on what has been said earlier. While WhatsApp had already added a feature to fast-forward voice notes (1.25x and 1.5x), there are cases where listening to about 5 to 10 voice notes gets tiring.

Now imagine a feature that converts voice notes into summarised texts using AI. That would save you the stress of having to listen to long voice notes, right? As a product manager, I can test this by rolling out a limited beta version and tracking engagement metrics to see if users really want it or not.

Now let’s move into the second feature, shall we?

2. Group Chat Summaries

It’s quite common to find yourself in a situation where there’s a heated argument in a group. It could be about anything: football, politics, family issues, etc.

You might be actively participating in the conversation when something urgent comes up and makes you leave the app for a few hours. By the time you return, you could be left with over 1,000 messages to read.

It becomes a big hassle to go through all those messages, especially when more keep trooping in. A single feature can be added to solve this problem: incorporating AI to summarise any unread messages above 200 into a single message. This summary would filter out unnecessary chats, jokes, and banter while capturing only the important information you need to know before rejoining the conversation.

It would really be an amazing feature if you ask me.

Now to the third feature:

3. Message Scheduling

There are lots of times when I want to send a message to someone at a particular time, but then I get carried away by something else entirely. For instance, being someone who isn’t really good at keeping track of birthdays, one of my friends once informed me that his birthday was coming up the following week.

I got so engrossed in my activities that I completely forgot to wish him a happy birthday until I saw the status of a mutual friend a day later. I had to rush back to his DM and send a belated birthday message. It wasn’t exactly a good feeling, I must admit.

Now, I know you can easily set a reminder on another app like Reminders or Calendar for these events, but why leave WhatsApp to do that when there could be a feature that allows you to schedule messages right within the app? After all, the goal is to keep users on the platform as much as possible.

I strongly believe this feature will go a long way; you could easily schedule a message to wish your girlfriend a happy birthday at exactly 12:00 a.m. without having to stay up all night just for that.

As a Product Manager, I believe building or introducing new features shouldn’t be driven solely by personal assumptions or what we think users might like. It should be grounded in real user data, behavioural insights, and analytics. If these features can be introduced on WhatsApp as a test run to observe user behaviour and engagement, it would provide valuable evidence on their impact.

WhatsApp, as a billion-dollar company, would be taking a significant step toward enhancing user experience and staying ahead of evolving user needs by exploring these additions.

What other features would you like to see on WhatsApp? Let me know in the comments.