Google Product Manager Interview - Flawless Interview Answer by Google PM: Teleportation Strategy

hi and welcome to project alliance today we're going to show you a few crucial interview techniques you'll need to crack even the hardest google interview questions to do this we'll interview a google pm with a difficult strategy question then break down his answer to extract some key skills you're going to want to add to your arsenal now pay attention to how this google pm brainstorms creative use cases and takes the opportunity to showcase his knowledge of business models pricing and go to market strategy now i'll hand it over to our host adi to start the interview go ahead adi now let's switch gears a little bit and talk about a fun creative question let's say that you're the ceo of a startup that just figured out how to build a teleportation machine and the way this machine works is when you step into it you can determine any coordinate on the planet earth to go to type it in and you bam are just like teleported over there it costs you 10 million dollars to build this actual machine and a hundred thousand dollars to use it every single time as the ceo what target market would you go after what is the business model that you would use what are some of the use cases that you would look at after you've developed this technology sure uh let me just ask a couple clarifying questions i think there's a lot more nuance here to unpack so uh so you said that this is a machine you can type in coordinates and go anywhere on earth you don't need a second machine at the point uh the destination right yeah that's actually uh that's a good point you don't need a second machine at the the destination if you put the coordinates in in point a you can go anywhere else with that okay cool uh and then uh you said you can go anywhere on earth uh could you go any height you wanted like 10 feet up 100 feet up 1000 feet up great question you can go any depth or any height yes okay got it and then uh about this machine uh about how large is it it's the size of a phone booth okay and i assume you can ship uh both people and objects yes you can place anything and that object whether living or not will appear on the other side exactly how it was before got it okay uh and then um how long does it take before it breaks or has to be repaired let's assume to make this question simpler that it doesn't break as long as you use it at least once a year the machine will stay well oiled and start working sure okay and then uh can can we patent this can we make sure that no one else can create a competing teleportation machine yes as you can imagine it's very very difficult to make this and uh you as soon as you invented it you have already been granted uh all patents and iep protection for this idea that's quite nice uh la couple class questions uh can someone hack it no uh so the way this works is uh it uses a special technology that you've invented so you can restrict the access to whoever you want to give access to using biometric data and it's let's say it's a dna based solution so nobody can hack it all right very sophisticated uh last question for now uh can i produce an infinite number of these or is there some kind of limit there's a limit that's a good question uh there's a limit of 10 machines that you can produce every single year got it okay uh okay that's enough questions for now uh give me one minute can i just sketch out some ideas the first thing neil does right is keeping his composure the average candidate is just dumbfounded when they get to this question a good tactic that neil uses here to avoid freezing is taking a few minutes to ask questions and clarify your assumptions neil is able to buy himself time but also catch the trick that audi had hidden in there that the teleportation machine only goes one way and that you need to have a second machine on the other side if you want to get back most of the candidates would have just glossed over these details and maybe missed a crucial piece of data which as you see becomes very important down the road neil goes on to ask a lot of other great clarifying questions like the cost of running the machine and crucially he doesn't just stop once he asks his last clarifying question he doesn't wait for audie to give him permission to move on he confidently drives the conversation forward and keeps building on his momentum really well done all around all right so i'm going to start by looking at what the use cases are like what are the situations in which someone would want to do this or to use this product now i'm going to say the 10 million dollar upfront cost will advertise out across all uses the real question is what kind of use cases for what kind of use cases would you want to spend 100 000 or more um you know uh to do this for each marginal trip so basically for what kinds of trips is the value of that a hundred thousand dollars so you know the alternative basically has to cost more or you know the other benefits of this thing have to add up to more than a hundred thousand dollars or whatever the price ends up being of economic value for the user so before we go into the use cases let me just explain what i think the benefits of this are so obviously it's it's fast and it's convenient it's you know more so than any other known form of transportation but i also want to mention that it's very secure right like i can imagine there's all kinds of times when you have to transport something you have to go on a plane there could be you know attacks on that if you're trying to put trying to transport goods you know there could be criminals or robbers along the way you could lose things right this is probably the most secure not just the fastest but the most secure more transportation ever invented so you know when i think about the use cases here i think anything that would normally be dangerous or slow or you know expensive or just difficult to do those are the kind situations where you'd want to use this thing so basically not just speed also security and all just things that might be logistically difficult to do so i think we can break down these use cases into let's say a couple buckets um first one is just personal use you know i i think that most billionaires want to have this i'm trying to think who would be willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars on something you know like i i too hate transatlantic flights you know but i'm not willing to spend 100 000 on each one i think the jeff bezos's of the world who are trying to you know go to davos uh they would be willing to spend that kind of money not many of them and i think the the problem with this is you know it's it's it's not a round-trip thing it's one-way teleportation so you know you'd have to basically have a have machines on both sides so both your home and davos or wherever you wanted to go uh and i'll get pretty expensive pretty quickly um so or or you do this one way and you do the the private jet right over on the way back so you know it ends up being pricier than we might think for uh personal use i mean i think like the basis of the world would still do it but it would not be as as cheap or as simple as we would think so that's one i think there could be some use if for uh businesses as well i think many of them would like to transport their ceo places uh for you know a lot of the top fortune 10 companies uh maybe even 1450 time is money right like you want to get the ceo places the ceo's got meetings to go to and places to be and i would be willing to bet that a private jet is going to cost let's say more than a hundred thousand dollars per trip or you know the the added convenience and security uh would make this thing a hundred thousand dollars plus per use uh make that economically worth it for these ceos so i can imagine every fortune 50 even fortune 100 company buying this for their ceo i think there's some use in politics too uh you know i i know the budget for air force one is you know millions billions of dollars a year i i could envision every head of state wanting this right because it is the most secure way to transport the president or whoever from point a to point b again problem is that it's not it's not two-way so you know the u.s president if they were to use it would have to basically have a thing installed in every single place they wanted to go to every single city in america they want to go to every country you know other you know like one in camp david one pentagon one in the white house so it would get very complex and very expensive very quickly and i think some with enough resources could still do it but you know it it's not as easy as i go anywhere i want back at the snap of a figure so you know maybe those use cases the one i actually would like more uh is i think the industrial use cases right because you can ship objects in this and you know i think i just watch a lot of um you know robbery heist movies but you know whenever you're trying to send expensive stuff like when the fed is trying to send dollar bills to a bank when you're trying to like you know teleport diamonds or gems or rare objects gold bars you're trying to transport some of this stuff across the world one it's very expensive to do that uh armored trucks don't come cheap it's also very in dangerous insecure uh because you know even if you hire like 15 guys with guns to you know go with your truck everywhere there's so many points right so many weak points where an attacker could come in and you know basically take your goods and you know even if one of every hundred one out of every thousand shipments gets waylaid like this you're in deep financial trouble right so anytime you're trying to transport some of these let's say small valuable goods um that ordinarily will be very very very uh tempting to robbers you this thing i think would make a lot of sense for those use cases i think it's also useful in general for when you're shipping like objects that would normally you know they're time urgent or and would just take a lot of time to transport a lot of money to transport i'm thinking here of like silicon chips because i know you know you look at these tiny tiny uh cpus right in other micro semiconductors you're putting those on a boat and shipping them across the pacific or whatever it costs a lot of money and they're so small that you can easily pack thousands and thousands of these things inside of a phone booth basically and you'd probably be able to get them across you know for a hundred thousand dollars it's probably much cheaper than having to do it uh via a boat or anything like that so basically anything that's really uh you know uh valuable and easy for roberts to get or just things that are pretty dense uh and uh you know normally cost a lot of money uh to teleport or to move with normal methods i was thinking about uh perhaps like perishable goods because you know getting refrigerated shipping containers is really expensive um i think the problem is that you know how many frozen chickens can you fit inside of a phone booth right not that many and so as a result putting these things on a shipping container taking across the ocean is probably is probably in the order of like 10 20 50 000 but like you know you can only fit so many of those things inside of a phone booth and so i think the the monetary value this would actually be quite low so i think the use case is weaker there i think again it's much stronger for the things that are really small really dense so you can ship a lot of them in one in one go with this thing uh in terms of other industrial things i think we could do perhaps like mining uh so for example you put one of these things at the bottom and of your mind or at the surface of the mind you could teleport them instantly to sellers or redistributors around the world i think this actually makes more sense than shipping people because this is a one-way thing right so it's really good if you're doing outbound shipments to things you don't expect them to come back and this i think describes retail and industrial use cases very well more so than people because people presumably want to get back from wherever they want to i think there's some other use cases like uh you know i i know it's really really hard to say ship uh like groceries and other goods to very remote villages and cities uh you i'm sure you've seen the tv shows about how hard it is to get a truck of supplies up to the himalayas i don't know they'd be willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars for you know each shipment of groceries again these things are pretty big not very dense so you'd have to do this kind of shipment over and over and over again and so i don't think the money you know the financials will work out for that so i think in some the use cases i would i would think about the most some people some personal things maybe for you know presidents ceos billionaires partly i think the real winner here is going to be those industrial use cases selling dollars from the fed to banks teleporting you know rare art and jewels and gold bars and things that robbers would otherwise be quite keen on and all they're also just teleporting very dense uh or very small objects that are quite valuable and quite hardship otherwise cpu chips gems from mines for example stuff like that so that's what i would think about in terms of the use cases that's the kind of folks that i would want to sell to neil took two minutes here to gather his thoughts two to three minutes is actually the sweet spot any less and you won't have enough time to structure your ideas properly anymore and the interview will start expecting an insane amount of detail and thought clarity next he went on to bucket his use cases notice how he started with the high level categories business industrial shipping and so on before digging into the details this brett first approach ensured that he didn't ramble and gave audie the opportunity to jump in if he had a certain use case or was really keen on a course correct if he thought neil was missing something by listing the buckets first neil also bought himself time to think which will go into each and you can see that it paid off neil filled in the white board with a ton of great ideas and he captured buckets that most candidates would have missed so now in in thinking about the business model so i think there's a couple of business models we could do one is we sell you the thing up front and you can you know use it forever no no additional cost one is we sell an all you need subscription so you know sell the sell the thing it costs and uh you you spend you pay us you know million two bucks and you can use as many times as you want or we could just charge uh per use that's not all you can eat but each time you use it uh you gotta pay a small amount so what i'm thinking here is that because this thing basically runs forever and is never going to break uh i think if we sell it we basically pay have people pay up front we're losing a lot of money on the table right leaving a lot of money in the table because basically once we sell it we will never again get any kind of revenue from this no additional income from this ever again and i think that's you know we built teleportation device right there there's so much more money we could be making off this thing than if we just sold it once up front especially when we're making 10 a year it's really hard to build a giant business if you're just selling 10 times you know some some fixed cost there so i would discount that one i think the more interesting question is do you do it as a subscription or do you do it as a or you know all you need subscription or do you do it as a paper use now i think subscriptions work well when everyone's going to be using it roughly the same amount think about netflix right there's only so many movies you can watch in a given year so it makes sense to have it all you can eat but i think with this thing there's gonna be varying uh amounts people use it right like a ceo might use it it's like 10 20 times a year 50 maybe uh versus if you're using it for the fed to distribute dollar bills to banks they're going to use it hundreds of times a week if not hundreds of times a day and so i think when you have these you know one-size-fits-all subscriptions you're basically you know if people are going to want to use it less you have a deadweight loss of source they're just not going to to buy it whereas you're going gonna use it a lot more you're leaving a lot of money on the table because you know if someone's paying you know you know let's say a million two dollars a year they use it every single day dozens of times a day you're missing out on a lot of money so basically for these things where usage varies quite considerably you don't want a one-size-fits-all solution instead you want to charge people per use so i think now the question is how much we sell for for upfront and then how much do we charge per use so i think that early on people might not really believe that this thing works you know i i too would be skeptical if someone claimed to have invented a teleporter so maybe the first year i would sell these things at cost just to get them out in people's hands i mean i think they would sell out pretty quickly uh but i think just early on just to build that you know just to make sure that people want it that people get it and just to build that user base i would sell it cost sell 10 million bucks i think in future years as demand increases we can probably sell it for more but i would be careful because uh the higher we sell it at then the more chance there is of a secondary market uh be forming right like you could have uh you could have someone buying these things for 10 million and then reselling it for you know 15 million or something like that down the line or um you know if you sell over much more than cost then you'll have a whole bunch of resellers and that hurts because then you get less and less control over over the products going forward so i would sell its cost at the beginning maybe increase it afterwards now the question now is how much do you charge per use obviously you want to charge more than a hundred thousand dollars per use because that's how much it costs us to do it and i think we want to get a pretty good margin on this thing too um you know i would say we need at least let's say 50 margin so no less than 150 000 um per use now we had to think about the value this would provide to the various use cases that we care about and again i don't think we're trying to compete on price right like the real value prop is the speed and the uh safety so as long as i think the price is in a relatively decent band or you know in the ballpark of what the alternatives are we can get away with charging it because the value prop of speed and security is just that much better so let me think uh let's take the example of uh you know i'm i'm de beers and i'm shipping diamonds somewhere right to a customer i'm guessing that to do this you'd probably have to have you know a series of armored trucks you'd have to have a bunch of secure airplanes secure boats you have to hire guards right i think the whole thing for a shipment of let's say a truck sized um you know container is i don't know million two million maybe three million uh so let's say that you know this truck could contain i don't know five or six uh you know phone booth sized amounts of material so you know the cos so basically the things that to teleport the same amount of material uh in our uh you know in our phone booth thing would cost you know a minimum 150 000 times let's say six because six phone booths at minimum in a truck nine hundred thousand dollars versus a one million or two million for uh the conventional truck now as i said i think that value probably just like like way too good it'll be too much of a bargain because you're getting it for cheaper and it's faster and it's more secure i might want to make our price you know about the same as uh as the old school method maybe even a little bit more because i think people would pay premium for the security um and the speed so you know why why don't we say that um you know we'll break even on price uh you know let's say about two million dollars to ship this thing normally um divide by six it's called about three hundred thousand dollars um per shipment uh i i'm just thinking in terms of uh how how you would ship uh you know things with an armored truck i think it's going to be that million two million dollar range three hundred thousand dollars per use of this thing is gonna be quite cost competitive we may be able to ratchet it up later uh maybe to five hundred thousand dollars or so uh i think 300 000 is a good starting point so so just to recap where we're at here i would sell the thing at 10 million dollars up front and then 300 000 um per use and i think there's actually a caveat i would throw in here like i feel like the people who would jump to buy this first are probably the billionaires um the problem is that we only have a fixed number of these we can create right and i think that billionaires use it like five times a year maybe 10 whereas you have these industrial use cases that would be using it hundreds thousands of dollars a year right and so basically i would want to make sure that people who people who are going to use this thing more are going to buy it and not the people who are going to use it less and just have it on their shelf basically just as a trophy or just used to go to davos in aspen every year so maybe we could do is add a minimum amount of trips right so let's say the the the contract here is it's 300k per trip but you have to make a minimum of let's say i don't know 50 trips a year i'm just saying i'm just basing this off of you know maybe you do one trip a week on average or the minimum usage should be one triple week on average i think for industrial use cases it would be at least once a week so that means about 50 a year and so by doing this right so basically it's like 300k per use but you got to spend a minimum of 15 mil a year this would i think discourage some of the billionaires and ceos who would use it less and make it look more appealing or basically save the inventory for those more industrial use cases where we can get a lot more usage and therefore a lot more money so when most people are asked go to market questions they talk about either target users or business models right here neil did both which was excellent he mentioned user groups like miners billionaires and cpu manufacturers and he also weighed several business models he made another great move when he talked about the three business models upfront versus subscription versus pay-as-you-go most candidates just say that they'd use a subscription model and leave it at that but neil used logic and math to explain why pay-per-use is actually the best model and then neil went on to critique his own decision which is always a good move by showing the pitfall that someone like bezos would buy the machine and never use it so we quickly added the minimum uses per year requirement to patch that hole this showed a lot of flexibility and intellectual curiosity on his part so in terms of the like financial projections there you know the first year i would probably only sell like eight of these uh because i think i keep the first two as a demo you know you'd say i don't keep one new york city and one in i don't know shanghai tokyo and just basically take any reporter who really cares about it and just say all right i'm going to teleport you from here to shanghai and then shanghai back um you know uh for free and just to prove to you that this thing worked as an interviewer i have a rubric and what made neil go from a higher to a strong hire was when he brought up demo units when you claim to have built a technology like this nobody's going to believe that it works they're going to want to see it with their own eyes so to have two demo units in the first place and target reporters was a clever insight he glossed over the reasons for choosing his two cities of new york and shanghai but there were a lot of strategic insights behind them what are the two biggest financial markets in the world the us and china what are the financial hubs of both new york and shanghai by putting his demo units in those two cities nia was able to reach both eastern and western markets with ease it was a brilliant insight and a great way to show his knowledge of a global tech trend this is something that 99 of candidates would have missed so first year i would sell eight so that means we pull in 80 million revenue from just the machines alone and you know the minimum that we're going to charge people is 15 mil so you know 50 travel trips so 300 000. i think the industrial use case is going to use it more let's say the average customer is going to use this thing 200 times a year so 200 200 times a year times 300 000 that's 60 mil in revenue so that means we're going to pull in 60 mil times 8 to 480 mil um look at that right sorry uh 200 200 uh uses times 300 thousand dollars that is 60 ml yeah right so that times eight so 480 um from that and then we'll get the 80 up front from that so we're gonna pull in about half a bill half a bill from this um in the first year and i think in the future years we could probably you know sell all 10 we could charge maybe 20 million dollars a year we could probably keep a similar price per trip maybe increase to 400 500 000 so we might be getting close to billion dollars in revenue in the future years uh and and you know or they'll be just in marginal revenue we have the previous years of course so uh we'd have you know more revenue from the future years and we'd be able to get um money from uh people who had already used it or already bought it before so i think our revenues in the first year might be half a bill but i think in every year after that we'd probably be adding another half a bill or even one bill so you know the revenue would definitely you know hockey stick over time ideally so uh yeah uh i i think i'll leave it at that i think in terms of revenue last thing i'll mention is that in terms of revenue we might be able to sell other things like we could sell insurance right like maybe you don't want your maybe the thing doesn't break but if there's an earthquake or a tsunami and your thing is destroyed i'm sure people are going to want insurance on us we could make money selling insurance we could sell like you know operators or maybe operators are included in the hundred thousand dollars but if not we could sell operators we could sell like consulting services right like help you figure out where to place these things right help you figure out what do you build around these you definitely want some kind of security around them so how do you do that right we could tell them that it's all services we could sell you know prefab buildings of like this includes all the security you need around your machine i think that might be a good answer revenue source um i don't i doubt it would be as much as just like the money you get from every single trip but it could have you know a couple couple mil here and there to our revenue so that's what i would do um i'll stop there i think that's enough awesome thank you for that i think i i followed you your thought process and i was able to understand like the different things that you're proposing and i understand the business model that you've you put in place for some of these industrial applications so if you had to go back and do this question again is there anything that you would have done differently here neil got one of the most common follow-up questions what would you have done better when you get this question you might start thinking did the interviewer catch my mistake should i bring it up realize that the interview has probably asked this question to 30 people before you and the odds are that they definitely caught your mistake so don't try to hide it instead use it as an opportunity to add more meat and insights to your answer neil did this admirably with his callout that we just invented teleportation and that we should definitely be making more money he correctly identifies that he underpriced the product and goes back to revisit his pricing strategy which gave him more time to showcase his financial skills personally i think his pricing was pretty good for the first year since we're trying to build awareness but he was right that he could increase the price for future years since this product's going to change the world after all yeah you know i think i think i would have thought more about like getting even squeezing even more out of this because we've invented teleportation right like we should be pulling in a lot of money every year i think i might have undersold the benefit of the security and speed right i think even staying close to price uh with the current current shipping solutions is short-changing our solution like someone should be willing to pay like 3x as much 4x as much for this thing just because as i said if your shipment of jewels gets hijacked you're in a really bad spot financially right i think people are willing to spend a quite a large multiplier on this i think we could get away with charging you know 500k a million per trip and so maybe gave out some of the financials there but i think i was short-changing us i think we could definitely be earning more right like we should be earning a lot more revenue than just like any random tech company we invented teleportation right like this has to be ambitious so i might go back i might add more to that um i think there could be um there could be something yeah it could be something more for the individuals i kind of shortchanged that or i didn't talk about that very much again i do think the fact that one way teleportation doesn't really lend it very well to individuals but i think the heads of state thing is a little bit more um it's a little bit more compelling than i than i initially said it was because you think about how much they spend on secret service on you know air force one all the security things i think heads of state will be willing to spend a million or two per trip uh just to make sure that they're you know head of state or even other important folks in government uh stay safe so i think it'll be uh you know maybe a smaller market because there's only so many heads of state but you could earn a good chunk of money from that as well awesome thank you for that so neil's answer was a strong 10 out of 10. he covered a lot of ground in the 20 of the 25 minutes he was given if he had the full 45 minutes of a normal interview he probably would have wanted to zoom out and take a macro view such as by talking about the other innovations that the invention of teleportation could unlock when ai and ml were invented that catalyzed a revolution in consumer tech and gave us self-driving cars among other things the rise of blockchain disrupted finance and commerce and gave us a big boost for cloud computing similarly the invention of teleportation could mean that the innovations in nanotechnology or space travel or quantum computing could be right around the corner by doing this he'd be able to show his knowledge of broader industry trends and more importantly he chose passion for using science and technology to improve people's lives which is really a pm's true calling this kind of discussion would have been a great way to wrap up the interview had neil gotten more time thanks adi i think we learned a lot from that interview neil the google pm you saw blended together elements of brainstorming product pricing project launch business strategy and even estimation questions to create a compelling answer that shows a vast range of skills this is especially important at a place like google where some pm interviews are literally called the everything interview if you want to learn all the techniques and frameworks that kneel pieced together you'll find them inside product alliance's flagship pm google interview course where our instructors will teach you how to crack over a dozen types of interview questions that are common at google you'll also get 40 mock interviews just like this one including the whiteboard graphic and expert commentary you just saw we'll also show you video tear downs of google's 10-year product roadmap plus the upcoming strategy for key product areas like search cloud youtube and more and we'll throw in a list of interview questions that our team members and past customers have actually gotten during their recent google pm interviews we update our list monthly so you can study with the questions you might actually get asked word for word we built the flagship google course after talking to product directors hiring managers and pm recruiters from across google as a result we're confident that the course will put you a step ahead of hundreds of other candidates looking for the same google pm role and put you in a great position to land your dream job at google thanks for watching and we'll see you next time remember this lesson was just one tip of the iceberg so click below to check out the full flagship google pm course

Channel: Product Alliance

Views: 12,758

Keywords: google pm interview, google pm, google product manager, google apm, google apm interview, pm interview, product management interview, PM interview, google senior pm interview, google strategy interview, product alliance, product mangement interview, product manager, google product interview

Id: 9YgeKeGkVBM

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021