Hi, welcome to this Google product manager mock
interview. My name is Anika and I used to be a pm at Google where I worked on a number
of teams including YouTube, Google search and Maps. Today I will be playing the role
of interviewer and my candidate is Akshat. Hi I'm Akshat I was also a former product
manager at Google where I worked on messages in Google Stadia and I've done hundreds of mock
interviews. In this mock interview we want to show you what it's like to really ace your
Google interview so let's get started, Akshat no pressure. The question I'd like to ask you
today is “how would you improve Google Chrome?” Awesome so I guess my first question
would be what do you mean by improve, are there specific things that we're optimizing
for? So for example our goal could be to increase our user acquisition it could also
be to increase how often people use Google Chrome or maybe improve how satisfied they are
with the product, did you have a particular goal in mind? it's really important to ask
clarifying questions both so that you can make sure that you're on the same page as the
interviewer as well as so that you can scope the question into something that is feasible
to solve during the course of the interview, so when Akshat asks the interviewer what they mean
by improve that's a really great way to kind of narrow down the problem space and understand
specifically what the question is asking or at least one version of what can be talked
through in the course of this interview. Yeah that's a good point it's definitely a
broad question I'd actually love to hear your suggestions for what metrics you think would
be most important for Google Chrome to improve okay I think there's probably at a high
level maybe three or four different goals that we could have and
i'll talk through each of those. So to start there's user acquisition
and I think a common metric for this is just what are the number of daily active
users monthly active users etc for the product and I think it could be interesting to talk about
acquisition if our goal is to increase the market share of Google Chrome as a product and bring it
to more and more different kinds of user segments. Another goal or metric north star metric
that we could have is engagement with the product. Things that we could look at to this
end are how often are people using the product, what's the average amount of time they're spending
on the product every day or every week etc, we can also look at user satisfaction and there's
a couple of different ways that we could measure user satisfaction you know we could look
at csat or customer satisfaction scores, we could look at net promoter scores and a host
of other sort of user satisfaction metrics like we could look at help center or other places where
bugs and tickets are filed. And then another thing that we could look at is monetization right are
we monetizing the product well what's the average revenue per user roughly, so amongst those I
think for me what would be most important is making sure that the satisfaction of using Google
Chrome is high there's a lot of other competitors out there now and I think Google Chrome already
has significant market share so it's important to make sure that user satisfaction is high so it
continues to be one of the leading web browsers. One great way to show the interviewer that
you're kind of thinking two steps ahead is to proactively suggest different options or at
least you know what you think might be the best option for the clarifying questions you ask this
not only helps you take the question down a path that you feel might be best but it also shows the
interviewer that you know you have in mind what a great way to talk through this might look like
and that you're thinking about that ahead of time. Awesome I think that makes sense user said
satisfaction seems like a very relevant thing to look at for Chrome improvement. Before you kind of
get into it could you talk through what the metric for actually measuring that user satisfaction
improvement might be. For sure, so I think there's a couple of different ways we could gauge
how satisfied users are with the product we could run actual surveys two very common formats for
this are calculating this customer satisfaction score or csat and then the net promoter
score both of them give you an idea of how satisfied users are with your product and nps
goes even a step further and also can sort of measure how delighted your users are and if
they would actually be advocates or promoters for your product. for something like this I
would probably stick with a metric like csat just because people are usually not promoting uh
you know this is the browser I use there might be some power users but what we're really looking
for is making sure that most of our users are very satisfied so that they continue using Chrome
versus they adopt it for the first time. Okay great that makes sense so feel free to continue
talking through what those improvements would look like. Okay cool so our goal is to basically make
sure that customer satisfaction remains high I think the first thing we should do is probably
segment our user base and one way that I would segment all the different Chrome users you know
Chrome is a huge product it's got billions of users and they're all sort of different use cases
and different personas but one way that we could sort of stratify the user base is really just
by how much they use Chrome. I think there's probably three segments that I would look at one
is the power users and these users really spend almost their whole day in the browser you know
examples of such power users are knowledge workers so a lot of people who are spending time on the
computer and on the browser for their day job, this middle segment would be you know casual
users or middle users so people who are using the browser for leisure maybe just casually surfing
the internet semi-frequently and then finally the tail segment would be light users so these may
be users who are just infrequently using Chrome uh maybe just infrequently using the web right so I
suspect probably older populations or populations and less in areas with less connectivity. So
in terms of where we should focus our time I think for light users since we're not
focusing on acquisition or you know activation they're probably not the right people to focus
on because you know improving their csat scores is gonna is not gonna be super relevant to keeping
sort of our most high value users on the platform. I would recommend starting with focusing on power
users these are the users for whom like every little adjustment in Chrome makes a huge
difference this is where they're spending all their time and so having them be advocates for
the product or having a really good experience is is a good way to make sure that Chrome remains
like one of the leading web browsers. Spending time segmenting your users and thinking about
how different types of users might act and what those user journeys might look like is very very
crucial to answering a product design question the reason is because different users have
different needs and you want to make sure that you are building specifically for the needs of the
users you're focusing on the danger of course is that if you kind of go off of your own assumptions
or if you don't take time to walk through this and understand these nuances you might build a product
that users don't actually need or want to use. Awesome this all sounds good so far. Cool okay so then I guess I'll move into
talking about some ways that we could improve the csat scores for power
users, does that sound good? Yeah looking forward to hearing your ideas.
Okay cool so I'm personally a power user of Chrome so I'll basically draw on my own personal
experience and that of people I work with. I think the key pain points that I have as a user of
Chrome I think there's maybe two of them one of them is around Chrome's power usage you know we've
all had the notification that Chrome is using a significant amount of memory or battery power and
you know my computer definitely gets drained a lot faster when Chrome is open I imagine for power
users who always have Chrome on and probably have a lot of tabs open this is a this is a significant
problem so that's one sort of category that we could look at and the second one is productivity
so because we are using this you know user segment is using Chrome for work it's really important
that Chrome help them be as productive as possible you don't want to spend your day fighting Chrome
you want to spend it actually working on things that you care about. I think between those
two I'm probably going to focus on the latter so let me think about features that would help
me personally be more productive within Chrome, does that sound good? Sounds great
yeah feel free to keep going. Okay cool so when I think about you know as a user how I'm
using Chrome there's a couple of things that come to mind usually I've got a lot of different
tabs open and that's one big pain point I'm usually looking for the right tab to open or
navigating through multiple windows and tabs another thing that I use Chrome for is you know
managing my email and my meeting calendar those are tabs that I always have open and Chrome
is sort of like my central operating system so based on this there's a couple of feature ideas
that come to mind the first is a universal search feature so my use case here is that you know I'm
using Chrome I've got a lot of tabs open and I'm trying to find a very specific document I don't
know if the document's already open in a tab if it is I'd like to just go to navigate to that
tab and if it's not I'd like to open a new tab right now this is pretty painful in order
to find it I usually have to scan through all the different open tabs and this gets hard
when there's a lot of tabs because you can't see you know what the tab is actually
called you can just see the icon usually the document I'm looking
for is like a Google drive document right if I'm a power user of Chrome
then it's also likely that I might be using g suite and if I don't find the Google drive
folder or the Google drive document then what I currently have to do is I have to go to Google
drive open that up in a new tab pick you know what kind of document I'm looking for is it docs is it
cheats is it slides then I have to search for the thing that I'm looking for and then actually open
that up in the process of doing that you know I'm adding two or three new tabs and it's taking
me four or five steps to just open a document and then the final thing that I can do is I can
look through my history this is something that like I personally don't do that often and I would
imagine that users aren't looking through their history that often but even if you do you have to
navigate to the history tab and then you have to sort of look through all your history to find
the Google drive thing that you're looking for so one way that we can save the user a lot of
time and make them more productive is by having sort of a universal search bar and what this
search bar would do is it would essentially look at three different places the
three different places we talked about first it'll look through your open tabs to see
if you know any of them match the document that you're looking for they would also look through
your Google drive and there's a lot of things we could do here to make that really fast you know
you could have your Google drive sort of cached so that it's extremely fast right now or which
which it isn't right now rather and then it'll also look through your history you could invoke
the universal search bar through maybe a keyboard shortcut so you can imagine you know maybe you
press a keyboard shortcut and you type in the name of the document or like a keyword right so if I'm
looking for sales leads where I just type in sales leads and it brings up all the relevant things in
my open tabs in my Google drive and in my history and so with that the goal is to basically make
it as easy as possible for someone to get to a document that they're looking for so that would be
one feature idea basically a universal search bar another feature idea I have is you know I use
Google Chrome to look at all my emails and also to manage my schedule one pain point is you
know often times I'm working in Google Chrome and before I know it I've like I'm
I'm five minutes late to a meeting I think this is something that's happened to a lot
of us uh what I would love is for Google Chrome to be able to send me a notification that says hey
your meeting's starting and that notification just includes a link to join the meeting whether
I'm using you know uh zoom or Google meet or any other video conferencing platform it would
be great if instead of having to juggle all those uh I just have a single place to join my meeting
what I imagine this would look like for the user is if you know Google Chrome already lets you
create a Chrome profile where you can log in with your email and your calendar I think for people
who are using Google calendar which is probably a significant portion of the Chrome user base Google
Chrome can basically get access to your calendar and send you a notification before your meeting's
about to start and in your in your Google calendar there's already a field for each event for
you know what's the video conferencing link so maybe Google Chrome could essentially
intelligently figure out like based on what the meeting conferencing link is what conferencing
platform it's using it'll just automatically do the legwork to you know log me into that so the
user the end user experience would be you can keep working in Google Chrome working on docs you know
looking at the internet and then when it's time for a meeting you'll get a you know notification
from Chrome with a link to join without having to sort of find your calendar amongst all the open
tabs or find your email and keep checking that and I think the last feature that comes to mind is
really around sort of managing a lot of open tabs I know that Google Chrome introduced a couple of
new features around tab management recently where you can create groups of tabs and you can even pin
certain important tabs I think these are great I think there's probably a lot more that Google
could do especially with its capabilities in ai and machine learning the goal here would really be
to reduce the cognitive overload for users I think it's we've heard so many people you know talking
about like it feels so good to close that last tab or it's you know it's so annoying to have so many
different tabs open so I think we can have a much healthier and more delightful experience for users
by sort of smartly managing their tabs for them so I imagine some sort of like ml based model
that automatically surfaces tabs that the user navigates too frequently right so your email
and your calendar might be such tabs there's a lot of times we just have open tabs for things you
know maybe things that we searched on the internet but are no longer going to look at imagine
something that automatically kind of cleans those up so you don't have this uh constant you
know stream of tabs that you're no longer using I imagine for like the end user the way this would
work is it could be a setting in Chrome you know like a smart tab manager that you could toggle on
and off and once it's on it sort of learns over time based on certain signals right so figuring
out which of your tabs are the most looked at tabs which of them are never looked at again right
so this could just be like search results pages that you know you look at once but then they're
not looked at again maybe if you're a developer that's like stack overflow you want to keep
those tabs open right now maybe if you're you know a marketing person hubspot or salesforce or
whatever sas tools you're using it keeps those open but there's probably a lot of insight into
or that Google has that could help someone manage those better it's great to have multiple examples
as long as you can be concise and clear about them because it allows you to show the interviewer that
you can think broadly and have both maybe more simple easy to implement feasible ideas as well
as maybe a little more out-of-the-box creative ideas and that all of these are within your
spectrum of how you think about product solutions okay so just to summarize there's three
features that I talked about I talked about universal search and the goal here is to
help people get to where they want to go faster the second is meeting notifications the goal
here is to have people spend less time in their actual calendar tab and to basically join
meetings faster without with less distractions and then tab management which is reduce cognitive
overhead for people reduce the number of tabs that they have open and just overall make it a
healthier experience to work inside Google Chrome. When you get to the end of describing your ideas
and your possible solutions it's really helpful to just provide a quick summary of what each of
those ideas were and what the impact of each of those ideas might be for your user base. Awesome
I think these all sound great, I can certainly identify with the need for all of these especially
tab management so I'm I'm all for improving Google Chrome from that perspective but for the
purpose of taking a more objective look at the question how would you prioritize amongst these
three features? Let's say you know you had to start building next week, how would you decide
which of these three to start out with? yeah so I think the criteria I would use to prioritize
these there's a few the first I would look at is how much time could this actually save for users
right if our end goal is to make the users more productive then my question would be which of
these ideas actually will save users the most amount of time right and my assumption here
would be the more time we save users the more it'll improve our csat scores which is sort
of our north star metric and the overall goal uh that we're building towards the second criteria
I would look at is the apple uh the applicability across sort of our user base how many users would
this actually apply to and then finally I would look at what's the cost to build are there any is
there anything that's particularly prohibitive or hard from a technology standpoint and you
know sort of taking that into consideration so based on those three criteria if I think
about the different features that I suggested so for universal search I imagine this will save
someone a lot of time you know if I just think about like personally how much time I spend
looking for the right tab it's it's probably significant especially just given the number of
times I perform that action so my guess here is that it's probably the potential for saving a user
time is quite high and so I would rate that highly it's also pretty applicable across the user
base I think it applies even more to people who are g suite users but because we are talking
about Chrome I think it's safe to assume that a lot of people are g suite users or at
least a significant portion of the user base the second idea meeting notifications I
think this will also save someone time I think it would depend on how many meetings
they have so I think for people who have a lot of meetings this would be particularly useful
but it may not apply to as much of the user base you know I think on average people probably have
some meetings and then there's a set of users who have a lot of meetings throughout the day but
maybe this would only be super useful for them and then tab management I think I think
this is one of those user delight features I think it's very applicable across the user
base but it probably doesn't save the user too much time it it again going back to like
the thesis behind the feature it's really about reducing their cognitive burden uh and just
making Chrome an overall more pleasant experience it might not actually save them too much time
so I think based on those criteria the universal search is probably the most compelling from a user
standpoint just given that it has a potential to save users a lot of time and it's also applicable
across the whole user base in terms of cost to build because Google is sort of a leader in search
already I imagine that a lot of the infrastructure for building this kind of feature is there
or at least a lot of the know-how is there and that could be something that
is that we could take advantage of so I think to summarize I would probably
prioritize building the universal search bar first because it has the most potential to
save users time it applies to the most users and you know the cost to build is reasonable
and if not at least as much as the other ideas. It's very important to be data driven about
how you define this prioritization process and just like Akshat you want to define your criteria
for weighing features against one another up front so that you can have a clear very data-driven
approach to how you make that decision. Awesome that makes a lot of sense I'm I'm just
imagining looking through my own files on the Google search homepage and that sounds like an
amazing experience so now I'm waiting for the day that that actually appears on Chrome, but thanks
again Akshat that's the end of this interview, well done you did an awesome job and thanks again
for being with us today. Thanks, I had a lot of fun. Awesome. Overall Akshat did an amazing job
with this question and I would say the one general takeaway I would highlight from how he walked
through his answer is to always communicate what you're thinking as you're walking through your
solution process so you'll notice that even when he was kind of thinking independently he talked
out loud with the interviewer and walked through that process and that's really important
so that the interviewer can understand how you come up with ideas how you prioritize
and ultimately how you make decisions as a pm. Well I hope this interview was helpful to everyone
who's watching, both Akshat and I are coaches on IGotAnOffer so if you have an interview coming up
and you need to prepare you can find us there and feel free to reach out. Thanks to everyone again
for joining and good luck with your interview
