Interview Types

• Product Insights

  • Google Product Managers should first think about user experiences, start from the customer’s perspective by using tools and the expertise of others to gather user insights in order to understand and empathize with user needs, including incorporating users with varied life experiences.

  • With the user in mind, create the purpose, value, and perspective of what the product should be over the long term, and to articulate the vision to stakeholders. Convey a clearly defined product vision in a way that captures attention and creates a credible plan that compels others to action.

  • Finally, having the ability to combine an understanding of the problem space with a technical and business understanding of the options available to address it, and synthesize them into credible solutions. Ability to articulate the solutions across a range of detail depending on the audience.

  • Sample Questions

    • Build a new feature for YouTube.

    • Imagine you’re a PM for Google. Design a product for air travelers.

    • What is a common product that hasn’t reached its full potential? Design 3 new features for this product. How would you evaluate the success of this product?

    • Imagine you’re a PM for YouTube Music. How would you 10x its monthly users in the next 5 years?

    • Imagine you’re a PM for a large car manufacturer. Should the company use Generative AI or large language models (LLMs) in its products and workflows?

    • Imagine you’re a PM for Alaska Airlines. How would you improve the in-flight experience for customers?

    • Design a gift-giving service for Google. Describe the user interface, technical implementation strategy, go-to-market plan, and estimate this service’s total addressable market (TAM).

    • Design a product for chefs to speed up the cooking process.

    • Design an ATM for London’s Heathrow Airport.

    • What’s your favorite product and why?

    • Design a vending machine for a fancy hotel. What is the potential market size for this product? How would you evaluate the success of the product launch?

    • Design an alarm clock for children 100 years in the future.

    • Design a direct competitor to your favorite product.

    • Design a product for drivers driving in rush hour.

    • Design a product to memorialize pets who have passed away.

    • Design a fire alarm for the deaf.

    • How would you monetize WhatsApp?

    • How would you improve your favorite product?

    • How would you improve Google Docs? What are the key metrics?

    • Design an educational product for YouTube.

  • Assessment

    • Gathers insights from diverse user groups and incorporates them into product vision

    • Articulates a clear, compelling, and long-term product vision

    • Synthesizes technical, business, and user insights into credible solutions

    • Communicates solutions effectively to different audiences

    • Demonstrates a user-centric approach and empathy for user needs

• Strategic Insights

  • By incorporating and applying one’s understanding of the customer, competitive intelligence, external trends, and data from lagging/leading metrics, Google’s Product Managers can successfully establish or adapt strategies. They are able to account for how different strategies and decisions impact results of a given product. This could include defining short- and long-term monetization or cost savings opportunities, customer choices/options, and pricing strategies.

  • Sample Questions

    • What are the key metrics you would use to measure the success of Google Sheets?

    • If you were the PM for Lyft, what dashboard would you build to track health of the app?

    • What should Google Photo’s north star metric be?

    • Devise A/B tests to improve user frustration with Google Maps.

    • What metrics would you focus on as the PM for YouTube?

    • What metrics would you focus on as the PM for Spotify?

    • What should Airbnb’s key north star metrics be?

    • Should Google incorporate “Ad quality” into YouTube videos?

    • What metrics would you measure for a new feature on WhatsApp?

    • Say gift wrapping an item generally costs Amazon $4, and is not included in Prime. How would you make the call whether or not to include it in Prime?

    • Design an elevator algorithm to pick up guests.

    • You are a PM responsible for the restaurant section of Google Maps. How would you go about collecting and validating restaurants’ hours of operations?

    • What factors should google consider when deciding how much to bid to maintain place as default search engine on Firefox?

    • You are a PM at Spotify. What metrics would you use to decide whether or not to ship a new song recommendation algorithm?

    • Define relevant metrics for google search for COVID related searches?

    • You are a grocery store owner/manager. How do you determine how many self-checkout machines you need?

    • It’s your first day as a Google PM. Users are complaining that the internet is slow. What will you do?

  • How many elevators are required in a building with 100 floors?

  • Assessment

    • Defines short- and long-term monetization, cost savings, and pricing strategies

    • Accounts for the impact of different strategies on product results

    • Adapts strategies based on changing market conditions and data insights

    • Demonstrates strategic thinking and long-term planning skills

  • Incorporates customer, competitive, and market insights into product strategy

• Analytical

  • Google Product Managers demonstrate an understanding of challenges facing a product, absorb relevant information, and develop an opinionated perspective. This includes understanding of the product’s market/industry, competitors, and product space’s underlying functionalities and capabilities. They are able to articulate solutions across a range of detail.

  • Sample Questions

    • You notice a 30% change in usage of your product, what would you do?

    • As a PM in Gmail, you come in on Monday, take a quick look at the metrics dashboard and see received emails have dropped 15% last weekend over the weekend(s) before. What do you do?

    • Imagine you’re a PM for Gmail. Your team won a communications contract with a 10,000-person colony on Mars. Estimate how much network bandwidth this project needs.

    • Estimate the number of people who use Google Search to find a new job.

    • How many grocery stores are required in a metropolitan city?

    • Estimate the number of restaurants in San Francisco.

    • How many ping pong balls fit in a helicopter?

    • How much does Meta (Facebook) spend to acquire one new user?

    • Estimate the number of videos watched on YouTube per day.

    • How much money does the Play Store make in a year?

    • How many quarters do you need to reach the height of the Empire State Building?

    • What is the market size for driverless cars in 2025?

    • How many shampoo bottles are sold in the US annually?

    • How many drivers does Uber need to serve the San Francisco bay area?

    • Estimate Google Photos storage for Pixel phones.

    • Estimate the total internet bandwidth needed for a campus of 1000 graduate students.

    • Estimate the total dollar amount of online sales for fruits and vegetables per year in NYC.

    • Estimate the number of Gmail users in the US.

    • How many ping pong balls can fit in a helicopter?

    • Estimate the bandwidth of Google Maps.

    • Estimate the number of apps in the playstore?

    • Estimate the weight of a schoolbus.

  • How many messages per second does Gmail receive?

  • Assessment

    • Grasps the product’s underlying functionalities and capabilities

    • Analyzes relevant data and metrics to inform product decisions

    • Identifies and articulates product challenges and opportunities

    • Develops and communicates data-driven solutions at various levels of detail

  • Demonstrates a deep understanding of the product’s market, industry, and competitors

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Google’s Product Managers work with cross-functional teams (marketing, UX, PR, engineering, etc.) to get things done. They have the ability to effectively address difficult questions, handle pushback from a high-level audience, and maintain a professional demeanor while engaging in difficult or sometimes high-pressure situations.

  • Sample Questions

    • How would you manage through a latent field failure or bug that is directly impacting customers and driving return rates up or support contacts?

    • Your largest customer is loudly advocating for a new feature which is not in your prioritized roadmap. Sales, eager to please, have gone straight to Engineering to see if they can prioritize this request. What do you do?

    • How would you handle negative user feedback about YouTube, and how might you address it with the engineering team?

    • What are the top 3 technology trends that will change the landscapes in the next decade?

    • How would you explain cloud computing to your grandmother?

    • How does Google Docs work?

    • What happens when you navigate to a website?

    • How does Google Maps compute ETA?

    • Why is Gmail search slower than Google search?

    • How much storage would offline maps take?

    • How would you design a newsfeed algorithm for Google?

    • Design a key-value store.

    • How does the communication between Mars and Earth work?

    • How would you improve Google Docs’s real time collaboration?

    • Design a billing system for a doctor’s office that has two locations in the Bay Area.

    • How would you reduce bandwidth in a video streaming app? What technical metrics would you look at?

    • How would you create a high speed network to communicate with team members on the Moon?

    • YouTube went down last week. What factors do you think could have caused a big system like that to fail?

    • How would you choose a programming language to build your product at Google?

    • Design YouTube’s video recommendation engine.

    • How would you design the system for a ticket selling web application?

    • Design the architecture for google maps to load in under 100ms

  • How do you resolve conflicting product requirements? What or who determines which requirement takes the hit?

  • Assessment

    • Addresses difficult questions and handles pushback professionally

    • Maintains composure in high-pressure situations

    • Resolves conflicting product requirements and prioritizes effectively

      • Manages stakeholder expectations and communicates trade-offs

    • Collaborates effectively with cross-functional teams (e.g., marketing, UX, PR, engineering)

• Craft and Execution

  • While keeping the user in mind, Google’s Product Managers have the ability to strike a balance between level of detail, prioritization, and execution by being intentional. They demonstrate deep knowledge of the product lifecycle; the overall process for developing, maintaining, and evolving products. They are able to differentiate the roles and responsibilities of engineering and other functions, major phases, checkpoints, and deliverables. Google PMs understand common technical and non-technical issues and considerations for launching, updating, or sunsetting products.

  • Sample Questions

    • You are about to launch a new app that is of strategic importance for the company. 1 month out from launch, internal Dogfood suggests the app isn’t ready (you are below target on several key metrics including CSAT). What do you do?

    • Imagine I’m a VC, offering you $20M to build any technology-enabled product/service you’d like. Please walk me through how you would get started? (Problem, Solution, User, Monetize, TAM)

    • At what milestone or markers would you look for to determine if a product isn’t performing well and what considerations do you make before you sunset the product? What is the process you would lay out? How do you handle the stakeholders?

  • Pick a product of your choice. What are the goals of the product? What’s in your monthly business review deck for the leadership team?

  • Assessment

    • Demonstrates a deep understanding of the product lifecycle and development process

    • Differentiates the roles and responsibilities of various functions in product development

    • Identifies and mitigates technical and non-technical risks in product launches and updates

    • Makes informed decisions about product sunset and communicates them to stakeholders

  • Balances user needs, technical considerations, and business goals in product execution

• Googleyness and Leadership

  • Product Managers are assessed not only on core product skills but also on how you get work done and collaborate with others. Interviewers will use a mix of behavioral and hypothetical questions to assess:

    • Googleyness: Googleyness refers to the unique culture and values at Google. Share how you work individually and on a team, help others, handle ambiguity, and push yourself to grow outside of your comfort zone. Understand what it means to be Googley by reading Google’s corporate philosophy and the Google Values.

    • Leadership: Be prepared to discuss how you have used your communication and decision-making skills to mobilize others. This might be by stepping up to a leadership role at work or with an organization, or by helping a team succeed even when you weren’t officially the leader.

  • Sample Questions

    • Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.

    • Tell me about a time when you worked on a project with a tight deadline.

    • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone. How did you resolve it and what did you learn?

    • Tell me about a time you faced technical and people challenges at the same time.

    • What was your biggest failure as a product manager?

    • As a manager, how do you handle tradeoffs?

    • Tell me about yourself.

    • How do you prioritize?

    • Tell me about how you brought a product to market.

    • Tell me about a time when you made a decision based on data and you were ultimately wrong.

    • Tell me about a time you had to convince engineers to implement a particular feature.

    • Tell me a time when you had to make a difficult trade-off decision on roadmap?

    • How do you sell an idea to senior management? If you use slides, what would the content include?

    • Tell me about a time when you gained trust.

    • Why PM?

    • Tell me about a time when you went over and above for a customer

    • How do you create a product roadmap?

    • Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with your manager.

    • How would you manage through a latent field failure or bug that is directly impacting customers and driving return rates up or support contacts?

  • One of your teammates isn’t practicing inclusivity or valuing diversity. What do you do?

  • Assessment

    • Works effectively both independently and in a team setting

    • Helps others, handles ambiguity, and pushes oneself to grow

    • Shows leadership by mobilizing others and driving team success

    • Communicates effectively and makes sound decisions under pressure

  • Demonstrates Googleyness by embodying Google’s unique culture and values