Hi there everyone, welcome to this
product management Google mock interview. My name is José and I used to be a product
manager at Google where I conducted many interviews. Hi everyone my name is Mark Rose and
I used to be a senior product manager at Google, when I was at Google I
interviewed 100 plus candidates, José back to you. So the question I have for
you is: let's imagine that you are CEO at Uber, you just became CEO congratulations, what
would be your strategy for the next 10 years? Okay so let me make sure I understand
the question so now I am the CEO of Uber and what i'm trying to do is lay out the
10-year strategy of Uber, correct? Correct. Okay um can you tell me a little bit about the market
situation at Uber that maybe is demanding a new CEO. yeah it as you know like Uber struggles
with profitability it's a very competitive market there's no specific situation, kind of a
hypothetical scenario but yeah it's a very new industry so i'd love to to know what their
thoughts are for the next 10 years. okay okay and is there specific things that you want
to look for out of this 10-year strategy? I want to make sure that you stay high level so
like what are the big pillars that you see it's a very long time frame but want to understand
where you place the the bets right like where you put investments to accomplish that
study so go to a second layer of maybe high-level tactics that you use
our investments where you put them. okay great so what i'm going to talk about is
i'm the new CEO of Uber and i'm going to talk about the next 10 years of strategy understanding
that Uber's had some challenges with profitability with some market traction probably in line of
covet and then maybe lay out some key pillars that are going to be key investment areas that Uber
should invest in to achieve that 10-year strategy. I want to highlight two great things that Mark
did here firstly he asked adapted questions that encouraged me to give him more information about
what I was looking for, he also summarized what he heard and played back to me getting confirmation
that he was on the right track. okay correct so let's go and get started. so as CEO of Uber
first I want to confess i'm brand new to Uber so I don't know everything about Uber but let's
start with some assumptions about what Uber is so one is Uber seems to be in the transportation
space it started that way it started that way as an alternative to taxis in silicon valley where
it was a mobile app that allowed users to go from a to b and they can summon cars magically
from their phone and the cars would come to them and take them wherever they wanted to go and it
was a much better solution than taxis and since Uber has grown nationally now they're global and
it looks like they're expanding in a number of different areas like Uber eats and delivery
and other number of different Uber products and so the question is like okay so how do we
how do we see that 10-year vision how do we see that 10-year plan. okay so what i'm going to do
now is i'm going to take about a minute and i'm going to write down how I want to approach this
problem and i'll come back with how I want to approach the problem and kind of walk through
it so give me give me one second be right back all right great so let's get started so first of
all in a new pre-Covid world I used to love to get up in front of a white board and write everything
down but in this new world what i'm doing instead is i'm going to take this great sheet of paper
and what i'm going to do is i'm going to write down all the notes on this paper and then what i'm
going to do at the end of the exam is i'm going to turn around and show you my notes and kind of
show you the work that I did so to speak okay so how am I going to structure this problem first
is as CEO i'm going to come up with a mission for the company i'm just going to vent it on the fly
and that's going to be fun so i'm going to come up with the mission of the company and then what i'm
going to do is try and understand Uber's market through a strategic analysis and in this case
i'm going to walk through porter's five forces which is a classic market analysis so i'm going
to walk through competition i'm going to walk through customers i'm going to watch suppliers
i'm going to walk through substitutes i'm going to walk through the threat of new entrants and then
what i'm going to do based on that analysis is i'm going to come up with a summary and then what i'm
going to draw from the analysis the number of key pillars that emerge and that really is going to
be the 10-year strategy that we rest on and then what i'm going to do at the very end is debug it
a little bit because at the end of the day we're trying to make it you know 10-year strategy in 25
minutes or less and there's going to be a lot of things i'm not going to talk about so i'm going
to talk about the things I didn't talk about at the very end kind of throw some darts at my own
solution. okay so let's create a mission for Uber so I think the mission for Uber
should be to be the way you move it's very simple and I want to extend what they're
existing doing right so I want to think about it's not only about moving people right about
getting me from a to b but potentially it's also about moving things and they're already doing
this today but I want to be very very high level about we want to be the company that helps deliver
to to be the way you move okay and so everything i'm going to talk about then it hopefully should
build up to that strategy and we'll battle test to see if that exit works and actually let me add to
that just a little bit more so within that mission I want to have some key consumer tenants that
I want to build on which should be obvious but I want to be specific about them so one is you
know just with the Uber band is built on first it should be fast inconvenient two it should
be safe and three it should be environmentally conscious so we should think about those things
as we kind of build our strategy. One of the key pillars in product strategy questions is
articulating the vision as mark did here, he was able to put an ambitious mission
in simple words the way you move, he also put the user at the center when he
connected the mission to his customer principles. Okay so first first part of the strategy
competition i'm going to take a look at some obvious competition and also non-obvious
competition so again if our if our goal is to be the way you move i'll think of comp
that kind of classic competition right we've got things like like lift in the category if
you start to look internationally we've got other other people in the same category but actually
I think there are other insurance I think there are other players which are even more interesting
competitors I think Google is a really interesting competitor to Uber. Google has their I think
it's a waze no yeah waze waymo sorry waymo they bought waze - they have waymo which is their
you know autonomous cars which I think is really interesting technology there's also crews in
the space there's also amazon in the space there's also fedex in the space so you think about
like how you move things and how you move people they're actually a number of competitors and
when I look at what drives those competitors one they tend to be really big companies right Google
amazon tremendously well capitalized companies so we are competing against the big dogs and so we
need to take some bold steps and if you look at you kind of scratch the paint on amazon and Google
and companies like that and where they kind of find their strategic strengths they are
in areas like ai right in machine learning in mobile app development right and so I look
at those as kind of key themes we'll kind of put a pin in those right there's an old expression
that football is a game of inches and i'll say ai is a game of gradients and the company that's
going to win in any space is probably the company that has the best ai so when I look at competition
I look at some competition like Lyft and I think that's interesting but when I look at like bigger
competition like Google like like amazon like cruz self-driving candidates they're really
really interesting companies and they're really based on ai so i'm gonna take
ai and mobile as big key tenants the next thing i'm going to look at is customers
and this is really the power of customers Uber is in a really interesting space or actually
any transportation company is an interesting space where historically it's you know it's been a
taxi cab and taxi cabs have historically been very fragmented local companies you know oh
you're in san francisco called san francisco taxi cab right but it's completely different
company in new york a different company in kansas different company everywhere and that's
actually given Uber a lot of its strength and so there's a key learning there which is the more
customers the platform has the more powerful it is the less customers it has the less powerful
it is so if I look at the power of customers within the strategic roadmap I can say that the
key pillar that Uber should build on if staff should build on is a mass consumer offering
network effects compound greatly for Uber and there's a second part of that too so one is
around just the network effects there's a second aspect to it which is the importance of being a
global brand and Uber's already seen this if you travel internationally if you go to different
markets you'll notice that different markets don't all have Uber right that's because Uber
is only able to start in one place at one time right they started here in the us meanwhile
other companies have done a really good job of being like the first Uber right they saw
Uber and they basically copied their model and were able to get significant market share
why is this important for a 10-year strategy Uber really needs to be the be the way you
move and this really should be globally and in order to do that they're going to also need
to internationalize that also means they need to either go into these local markets and compete or
potentially to or maybe also to acquire companies as well too so you're gonna need a strong capital
base in order to do that so out of customers i'd say the key key driver here is really strong
network effects and key global distribution one okay so let me just ask a question there
because I definitely agree on the network effects want to double down on that global distribution because a lot of those network
effects about moving right are local and so why is that important to to be that
global brand like what would it's a good question it's important for two use cases I
believe so first use case is for people who are you know local but travel anywhere else right
for example I recently had a trip to singapore actually it was singapore yeah anyways so I went
to singapore singapore Uber is not the way you get around in singapore it's very frustrating
because I had to down yet download another app and another currency and it was a pain in the neck
right but that's one use case it's for people who travel internationally and that's actually not the
biggest use case however there's another use case which is around hey if this is about transporting
things then this is about the ability to transport things from a to b and that might very well
be across market lines and so having that international connected market is really
really important right so if I want to like send something I have a family that I converse
with in ukraine right if I want to send someone to something you know if i'd love to be able to send
it to Uber but if Uber's not in ukraine I can't do that right so I think the the world is growing
in nationalization I think that's important okay makes sense thank you so moving
on from customers now onto suppliers suppliers is super interesting in my mind and
this is the threat of suppliers that is the power of suppliers have over your business model and in
this case Uber has a major strategic weakness here and that strategic weakness actually is it's
also its biggest asset which is its drivers so today the drivers don't work for Uber this
actually is a really interesting problem it's an interesting problem because if you look at any
Uber driver what you'll see in their car is two things you'll see Uber and Lyft right they don't
really work for Uber they work for both companies they really work for themselves so this is a
major problem that Uber has in their supply chain which is that they don't control their they
actually don't control their destiny they don't control their drivers they don't they don't own
any of that they rent it which means that anyone else can rent it as well too like Lyft and any
other competitor so what does that mean it means strategically Uber needs to make investments
to start owning their supply chain so that they can be more vertically integrated and and have a
differentiator in the marketplace so how do you do that actually this actually comes back to some
of the competition and investment too so there are companies like like waymo that are investing
in autonomous cars and the nice thing about autonomous cars is you don't have people in them
you own cars and the cars take people from a to b and that's a really useful thing so I think
this is a just a key insight for Uber which is to start owning their supply chain and
to start making investments not only in ai but also autonomous driving and the investment
in autonomous driving is going to help them move so they can actually create their own supply
chain by actually owning their own car network okay now moving on threat of substitutions this
is an interesting one also but a light one so if you think about the threat of substitution in in
this space it's really things like taxi cabs and things like that and that's actually what made
Uber grow in the first place and it's actually unlikely in my opinion that people would go back
to taxis unless taxis became radically cheaper or a radically better way to go or somehow they
all had a mobile app so there is a risk of substitution and there's other substitutions
people can get around in other ways which is you know I can get around a bicycle i'd get around
on mass transit but you know they're they're the reality is those modes of transportation
haven't involved evolved in the last 50 years and they're unlikely to do so in the next 10
years so I don't think they're that interesting however I do think that there's a major risk of
substitution in moving things right and this comes back to the competition as well too right so if
we get into moving things which is about moving objects and parcels and non you know non-people
around from place to place to place the threat of substitution becomes very very real because
there could be other providers you could use like ups or fedex or amazon to move things around
and so this is an area that you'd want to focus on to make sure that potentially you'd have
lower margins or you have other devices so that you'd have the most compelling solution so
you could execute on your vision without and your substitutes aren't that great and it's not that
great of a business to be in right just a more of a commodity business and they wouldn't have the
ability to market and all of those sorts of things okay so the key takeaway there is actually
not not a lot on the driver's side because again it's taxis but the key takeaway on the
key takeaway on the on the thing side is to make sure that you have a really competitively
really competitively priced product so that you don't have a threat of having a low price
competitor kind of the price substitute come in okay new entrance threat of new insurance so who
are the new entrants in this space so I see two new entrants one is really interesting one is a
little less so so a new entrance is everything happening in blockchain today so i'm sure you're
familiar with dfi which is decentralized finance I can actually see something happening
in this space also for transportation let's call it dt right so potentially
there's a role of dt in the space and the question is how could Uber compete against
that how could Uber reduce that threat and the answer to that is it's gotta build a kick-ass
product right like it's got to build a product that just works so well that the decentralized
that it's the centralized nature of it is much better than the decentralized nature of
it right so this puts a focus on you've got to have a high quality product that's that's loved by
everyone so I think that kind of and and it's also you know the things we talk about fast and
efficient things like this so basically the strategic takeaway from this particular item is
that it's got to be high quality and well managed okay and there's one other piece too one
other potential new entrant which is hyperloop hyperloop's interesting this is elon musk's new
idea which is building tunnels through the earth and actually i'm really excited about this idea I
think it could be a great way to do transportation but right now it's very point to point right it's
about you know las vegas or chicago or someplace in dubai and actually I think those are great
things I i think that this is a new technology for Uber to consider but I think it's unlikely to be a
major impact in the next 10 years I think 20 or 30 years really big issue to think about but in the
next 10 years it's probably much much much further so in terms of strategic takeaways i'd
say take a look at it be aware of it but nothing nothing really action planned this is the
myth of a brother strategy question where you talk about the trends that will impact achieving your
vision and where you need to invest mark used the partner five forces framework effectively deriving
at least one key inside from each quarter first one alternative framework you could use here
is listing different options and their pros and cons but whichever framework you choose make
sure it's simple and easy to understand okay so now let's do a quick summary of where we are and
what kind of key pillars we've derived from that so again we've looked at competition we've
looked at customers we've looked at suppliers we've looked at substitutes we've looked at the
threat of new entrants what have we built from that so one is our 10-year plan has to be
a plan that rests strongly on ai it rests strongly on autonomous driving machines
autonomous cars from a consumer perspective that it has extreme you know network effects
right so that we really want to get everyone on this platform and then it needs to be a very
high quality product as well so these are kind of the the key pillars we're gonna rest on
and the key investments we're gonna make if you think about it is you know obviously
continue to make investments immobile and we're going to double down in ai and we're going to
double down in autonomous driving so there we have it there's our 10-year strategy now let me debug
this a little bit so so we've we've gone through a very complex problem in a very short period of
time the question is what didn't we talk about so you know there's a few things we didn't talk
about so one is we really didn't talk about what consumers think about Uber we didn't talk about
brand we didn't talk about all the local markets we didn't talk about you know hey maybe there's
the next emerging Uber coming out of iceland who knows right so we didn't go into a lot of detail
there we also didn't go into a lot of detail on m a strategy i'm sure there's lots of really
interesting companies that Uber could acquire along its journey to to get into local markets
actually also i'm sure there's a lot of really interesting companies that Uber could acquire also
in the technology space right I know Uber has had nascent nascent let me call it initiatives and
self-driving which I don't know if they're still doing or not actually but you know that could
be also a key area for acquisition right maybe maybe ford and those guys give up on crews and
and and Uber comes and buys cruz as an example and the last piece we really didn't talk about we
talked about a 10-year plan but we didn't really address margins in a significant way you know
I always like to think that great businesses exist at the at the intersection of demand and
profitability but we didn't talk about we didn't talk about profitability we didn't talk about
margins I just presume that if we made a great high quality product that people love you could
command a reasonable price and and have a good margin and have a sustainable business so far Uber
has made a good product but they're not profitable and so clearly that needs to change and hopefully
that can change in a way that consumers value and is also valuable for the long-term business
okay questions. yeah and it was also a conscious decision of not being profitable right so I think
they they could get there at potential expense of growth so yeah I really like the way that you
lay down these. mark was able to summarize the strategy in less than a minute which is always
a great sign also it's important to be proactive about pointing out the things that you didn't
have time to focus on and mark did this very well. So one of the things that you you mentioned
ai autonomous vehicles network effects high quality products which one do you think it's the
most important to get right? So understanding those there are four four bets, which one is
the highest location of your you know budget efforts for product managers what where would
you go? That's a good point so if I look at some of the original kind of key tenants I laid
out at the very beginning which are around fast and efficient safe and environmental right
I would probably put fast and efficient at the top of that list right and so because that's why
users would choose Uber in their first place it's like look I can get there fast and efficient I
can do it on my mobile app I think that my first investment would be an ai first and foremost I
think that's going to be the the primary first experience is I want to use an app I want to
get there I want to get there you know in a fast and efficient way and I think the app and the ai
behind that are the clear clear winner there god give me one example where that day I turn what
what what do you see as ai like what would be like over like in 10 years that that
that their investment will change that's a good question so I i think the
ai could change in a lot of different ways so today when you call an Uber or you call it you
know or you want to move a thing you actually have to tell it a lot of things right you have to say
oh I wanted Uber black or an Uber this or an Uber that you have to like go through all these things
I i think that the best day ai really anticipates your needs and the best ai really kind of
thinks for you so in the future you're like get me an Uber and one comes right and it comes
to your expectation of your context and being and where you want to go and maybe it senses like
oh you're with five friends so i'm gonna call her bigger one by mistake or oh you're going on your
wife and you're clearly under a nice restaurant so i'm gonna get a newer black or or maybe like oh
you're just going like from here you're going from here to home depot let me get you an Uber truck
so instead of an Uber black so you can get your rake or a piece of plywood or whatever it is that
that you want to go get so I think the the ai is not also about getting from a to b or getting your
package from a to b or getting your items from a to b it's about how it's about understanding the
context that you're in to be smart about making those decisions so you're getting there fast
and efficiently with the services you'd expect. Right I guess like I think original vision for
Uber was like press a button get the card I think what you're saying is you don't even need to press
the button the car will the right car will show. which is that wouldn't be nice just to be like
you want to walk out of the office and then like your car just shows up right and it says you know
says mark right on the window i'm like sweet i'll hop in that one. Mark was able to bring back his
customer principles to drive the prioritization it is very important to put the users front
and center when you have to prioritize. that's that's great cool maybe to to
close us off so you are you're painting a vision where over like moves
everything right it is moving they already started a bit of that shift but
I think you are you are explaining much more what you think should be the north
star metric for that to be right like like now you're you are defining these
pillars what is the main metric that you you want to grow over the 10 years to to
track that the accomplishment of their vision? Got it the main north star metric
so if we want to be the way you move I think the metrics got to be around that right
so I might call that the and usually metrics are usually best on a monthly basis i'd call it the
monthly move units like what am I moving monthly and that's going to be in my north
star metric right if i'm moving a billion things a month that's much better than
me moving you know half a billion things a month and so the more things i'm moving probably the
better my business is and the more healthier I am so that would be my primary metric is my monthly
my monthly move unit all right mmu. I like it. A North Star is a way to measure your progress
towards the strategy, it should be simple easy to track and should measure your progress
over the long term. Mark’s answer checks all those boxes. Cool this is this was all, thank
you mark this is the end of the interview, you did a great job thanks thanks for all the the
great answers and and and questions cool great and José I know it's a lot of work grading a
Google interview and I know now that we're done you've got to take all the notes down and write
it down and and analyze how this candidate did so I i just want to thank you in advance for for
taking that time I really appreciate the time with you so thank you so much. Guys thank you oh I hope
this interview was helpful for everyone watching, both mark and I are coaches on IGotAnOffer
and so if you want help prepare for your upcoming Google interview, feel free
to book a session with one of us
