What Are the Basics of Product Manager Interviews by Google PM
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Transcript of What Are the Basics of Product Manager Interviews by Google PM
What Are the Basics of Product Manager Interviews by Google PM
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Ankit Prasad
Tonight’s Speaker
TOC
My Background
What does a PM doThe project roadmapExecutingAnalyzing and iterating
Getting a PM RoleSkills of a PMThe interview process
My background
What does a PM actually do?
A popular explanation...
What, exactly, is a Product Manager? Mind the Product
But if someone asked you, “What is the Statue of Liberty?” would you
answer, “It’s between Manhattan, Jersey City, and Governor’s Island?”3 Types of PM, @danieldemetri
Owns the WHAT and the WHY
Design & Eng. own the HOW*
*All boundaries are soft
What problems are worth solving?
What features or products should we build to
solve those problems?
But really… which PM owns what?
VP / FounderWhat market has a problem worth solving?
Student loan process is broken. Let me recruit a team to solve it.
Director / Head of Product
What should the overall approach be?
I’m told we want to solve student loan process. We will build an online website to make applying easy.
Senior PMWhat features should we build?
I’m working on this online application. Let’s build a feature to let customers refer their friends.
Junior PMWhat should this specific feature do?
I’m working on this referral feature. Let’s make sure inviting friends is easy.
Mission: ship great features
Pre-building ExecutionLaunch, analyze, iterate
Roadmap
Product requirements
document
UX
Eng. designAnalysis +Decisions
Launch
Pre-building
INPUTS:
● Vision/strategy from the top
● Market research (what are competitors
doing?)
● Customer/user research (soft-stuff)
● Analytics (the hard data)
● XFN asks - BD, Marketing, Sales, Legal
● Your/team’s understanding *must be
validated
OUTPUT:
● ROADMAP○ i.e. a prioritized list of features
○ Big companies: Annual and Quarterly
OKRs
○ Start-ups: Backlog
Example of a roadmap
Example of a roadmap
Ideas based on: 1. Company vision/strategy2. XFN input 3. Your understanding of the
space
Example of a roadmap
Want a combination of small (but high ROI) wins
and mountain-movers
Example of a roadmap
Impact backed by user research and
analytics
Example of a roadmap
Here’s where a basic understanding of the tech-infrastructure helps. Talk
to your eng. lead!
Example of a roadmap
Goal: prioritize!
Small Company (eg. Earnest)
● Pop the next highest priority project into the hopper/sprint when previous one rolls off○ Esp. for agile teams○ Show of hands: who’s familiar with agile?
● Urgency from○ Aggressive growth targets need to be met○ Launch dates for big projects
Big company (eg. Google):Quarterly OKRs*/Goals
Company
Ads (owner: xyz VP in Ads team)● Grow ads revenue by $XX; with YY% growth in Video Ads and XX% growth in user quality
Payments (owner: VP of product for payments)● $YY gross value of txns; Launch in-store payments in XX markets
...
Product Area
● Launch Android Pay in XX markets (owner: director of product)● Launch Android Pay online on YY websites● Ensure ZZ% of people are in a “ready to pay” state with Google
Team
● Improve conversion with push provisioning (owner: PM; eng lead)○ Launch one-click card save flow○ Design server-to-server callback
● Take advantage of cards on file to acquire users (owner: PM; eng lead)○ Launch token upgrade notifications in XYZ market○ ...
● Launch 3 campaigns with merchants (owner: PM, eng lead, BD)
* OKRs are measurable goals. At Google, we shoot for 60-70% success rate.
Execution
● Write the Product Requirements Doc
○ What is the feature trying to achieve?
○ Details of how the feature should work.
● Work with UX to get mocks
● Get involved with eng. to understand (and optionally
inform) high-level design
● Collaborative process: you’ll give design input and
UX/eng. will have PRD input
○ Should feel like a team. Remember, you’re all on the
same side!
SECTIONS OF A PRD
● Vision
● Background research
● Goals & Non-goals
● Metrics
● High-level use cases
● Detailed design
● Launch plan
● Risks
● Privacy
● Legal
❖ Often driven by TPM or Eng. Lead. In that case, attend stand-ups so you know what progress is
being made, where engineers are getting blocked, and with micro-prioritizations
Task Planning
Launching
● What bugs are left? Which are launch-blocking?
○ Prioritize!
● Are the cross-functional teams ready?
● LAUNCH
● Analyze experiment results
● Decide what to do
Team Status
VP (Product Area) Pending
PM ✅
Eng ✅
Test ✅
BD ✅
Marketing FYI
Security Pending
Legal ✅
... ...
Analyzing Experiment Results
Start: 10/20/2014End: 11/7/2014
n=2,040,049
Metric Enabled - Lift (p-value)
Client retention (1-day)
1.5% (0.03)
Days engaged 0.4% (0.12)
Likes -1.2% (0.09)
Messages 2.3% (0.15)
Posting binary 0.4% (0.59)
Thread starters 0.8% (0.77)
● Some stuff went up
● Others went down
● What do you do?
Example on right:
● Launched a feature on Yammer* that let users
search for a message within a group
● What should we do?
* An enterprise communication tool. Think Slack or
Facebook for Work for the purpose of this exercise.
Analyzing Experiment Results
Wrong answer: more things are green then red, so success!
Correct answer:
Global metric: what metric most closely represents the top-level goal of the company? What
happened to it?
Local metric: How do you explain what happened to the local metrics?
Cheat sheet when defining the global metric: companies are either
● Transactional - key metric is # of funnel completions.
○ Loans and loan applications on Earnest, orders on Amazon, etc.
● Engagement - key metric is long-term usage, retention
○ Days engaged and retention (1, 7, 30 -day) for Facebook
■ So if # of posts read go down, but days engaged goes up…
Let’s look at those metrics again...
A single project may follow this nice schedule...
Pre-building ExecutionLaunch, analyze, iterate
...but your time doesn’t
Time distributed amongst (changes week
to week):
● Product strategy & planning (20%)
● User & partner research + meetings
(20%)
● Design sessions with UX team (10%)
● Working with engineering (20%)
● Metrics/analysis (20%)
● General coordination (10%)
Since you have projects in every stage of the
funnel.
So how do I interview for a PM role?
What do companies look for?
GOOGLE (and EARNEST)
● Hard skills
○ Analytical ability
○ Technical
○ Product & strategic insight
● Soft skills
○ Communication
○ Creativity
○ Culture-fit
YAMMER
● Needs
○ Product intuition
○ Strategy
○ Product Passion
○ Critical thinking
● Wants
○ User empathy
○ Communication
○ Math
○ Design sense
○ Technical competence
Interview Questions
● Product
○ Design X for Y (design an alarm clock for a blind person)?
○ How would you improve product X (or pick a product and how would
you improve it)?
● Analytical
○ Metrics focused: We ran an experiment that increased the font-size
on Google search. # of searches went up. What do you do?
○ Math focused: How many people fly out of SFO every day?
● Technical
○ What factors would you consider when deciding which videos to
show in the “suggested” column on YouTube?
○ SQL Basics: Given the following {SQL} tables, how would you produce
this other output?
What about the
soft skills:
Creativity
Communication
Culture Fit
1
2
3
4
Design X for Y (“the blue sky”)
Ask clarifying questions ○ What are the 5 questions you’re going to ask first?
Start with the user○ Who is the user? What are their needs?
○ If you’re not given a user, list some options, then
prioritize (quickly).
■ Eg. for each user base, think through needs
(unmet), ease of meeting those needs, etc.
List ideas/features○ Have at least 4-5.
○ Try to have at least 1-2 “out-there”, more creative
options
Prioritize and pick
A.B.S. :
Always Be Structuring
If I ask you to design a
toothbrush, I haven’t
really told you much.
1
Example: Design a Music System for a Car
Ask clarifying questions:
- Who is the user?
- Where do they live?
- What type of car?
- ....
Start with the user:
- Pick a user base:
- Mom driving SUV,
lives in appt.
- Student in college
- Working dad in
house
- What are their needs?
Feature Ideas/Options:
- What features does it have?
- Where does it get music
from?
- Phone
- Local Storage
- Sync with home wifi?
- How do you control it?
- Voice?
- Bluetooth/phone?
- Touch?
- ...
Pick/prioritize between options
and why:
Pros Cons
Phone ... ...
Local ... ...
Sync ... ...
1
How would you improve X? Pick your favorite app? How would you improve it? (“the improvement question”)
Similar to previous, with the added complexity of:
● What is the current vision of the product?
● Who are the users, and what are some unmet
needs?
● What is the top-level goal/metric of the product?
● How would you structure an experiment to test
movement in those metrics?
However, do NOT dive
straight into the ideas.
Laundry lists != good
Go through the process!
Have some “favorite”
apps and 3 ideas to
improve each in advance
2
Example: Favorite app//improve it
Recently been using UberEats
Start with the user:
- App designed to help you get food you want
quickly
- User bases:
- Single working men/women
- Office workers during lunch
- …
- Pick one
- Single working men/women:
- Care about time
- Convenience
Improvement ideas:
- Single working men/women:
- Pre-selected menu of “top nearby items”
that are quick to make and deliver.
- One click order that lets you order these
popular items.
- …
Rank/prioritize
- Estimated impact of each feature?
- How hard will it be to build?
2
Analytics: Metrics focused
Often follow-on of improve X question:
How would you test the one-click order of popular items on UberEats idea? (contd.
from last Q)
Think: MVP experiment
Maybe start with a one-click “repeat last order” button?
Who would you test on?
What metric are you trying to move? (Think: engagement or transactional?)
3
Analytics: Math focused
How many planes fly out of SFO every month?
Lay out complete formula first:
# flights = # of days/month * minutes/day * take-offs/runway each min * # runways
Then calculate
Then gut-check
Then stress-testAlways surprised how few do this. Formula first is key for this.
4
Some resources I’ve found useful...
Cracking the PM Interview (Gayle McDowell)Good for understanding the roleGood for technical parts
Decode & Conquer (Lewis Lin)Good for practice to product
questionsGood, short, behavioral section
Quora/Medium/Google searchMore prep on specific company
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New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, London, Toronto
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