Google Product Strategy Interview: Photo Storage

amazon announced it's launching free storage for unlimited photos and let's say you're the pm for google photos what would you do [Music] hey everyone welcome back to another exponent product management mock interview my name is kevin way and on today's show we have haleem before we get started haleem can you just tell the audience who you are yeah sure hi kevin um i'm a i'm currently a product manager at facebook i've been at facebook for four years i worked on facebook profiles i launched and kick-started facebook avatars internally worked on virtual reality for two years and currently i'm working on a marketplace it's a product that helps workers find work in the middle of the pandemic previous to facebook i was a founder uh launched a couple of companies one of which got acquired by a coupon website in london very exciting and i mean holmen's being humble he also has many great offers he's coming from the course he um studied the exponent course and currently has offers at um google and stripe so congratulations i'm really happy to hear that helene thanks um today let's do a strategy question for this mock interview so here's the question amazon announced it's launching free storage for unlimited photos and let's say you're the pm for google photos what would you do great thanks for the question uh i'll take a minute i'll take a few moments to gather my thoughts that's okay great great awesome um before i jump in i do have a few clarifying questions if that's okay um so the first one is uh about the what would you do uh are we focusing here on a holistic strategy uh effectively you know we're not talking about many product improvements like a b tests but rather large large projects we would take on to basically counter that risk correct yeah so you're the pm i'm just really curious about what you would do when you hear this announcement from amazon and if you have any big ideas i'd love to hear what they are awesome that sounds great and constraint wise uh i am going to assume that yeah we we're operating within the realm of the possible but um that's uh we have a large team and we can we can create we can create things at scale so i shouldn't um i'm not going to limit myself with uh when it comes to ideas does that sound good yeah you don't don't limit yourself to any resource constraints perfect sounds good all right um so here's i'm going to share my screen just to uh use this as a whiteboard um so here's how i would like to go through this um i'm going to start by just you know grounding us in uh in the mission of the product itself so google photos but also talking about google itself um what what is it that the product is what is it that google is trying to accomplish what it's what is its mission and what the google photo is trying to accomplish um i'll then go to through just you know really you know porter's five uh forces and the reason why i want to go through this is almost um just like a checklist of all the things i need to keep in mind before i move into the next steps which is uh use cases where what are customers after what what do they want from prod from photo storage products like google photos and what what it seems amazon wants to offer now free storage um and then i'll do um i guess a competition a competitive analysis uh you know kind of google photos versus amazon amazon photos and see um and line up strengths and weaknesses so what i would like us to get to uh is something along these lines so google's photos let's just call the new product amazon photos maybe supposing it's part of prime and then kind of strengths and weaknesses uh and from there i'd like once once i've lined that up i think i can come up with a plan um some suggestions kind of a recommendation at that stage and then think through some risks and you know what would success look like at the end cool um as there are structure how does that sound before before i kick things off yeah this sounds good um let's get started sounds good um so google and google photos google's mission uh at a high level is to organize the world's information in a in a way that is accessible and useful to everyone and google photos fits uh very neatly into that larger mission it is a way to organize everyone's uh everyone's photos but specifically what photos are to people are their memories their past and so from an emotional point of view it's definitely one of google's um most most valuable assets because it is helping uh create an emotional link for people it is getting a job to be done an essential job to be done fulfilled for people um and so for from uh from a mission point of view google photos wants to become the almost like the library of people's pasts and memories and make that very accessible right so make one's past very accessible and easily uh and easily organize it there are a bunch of amazing features in there i can think of assistants that creates you know auto albums all the way to you know animate some amazing search features that can search for people's faces and animals or scenes in a nightclub stuff like that so it's a very advanced product and um if i were to think if i am if i jump ahead for uh for a second here and think about a bit about the landscape the competitive landscape um i it almost seems like at one point there was a lot of competition around photo storage so there was there were moments by facebook and carousel by dropbox but then just you know in the last couple of years i think google it became very clear that google photos is the winner in that market they simply took over and i think it's really due to that unlimited storage they've created uh they've proposed to everyone for free it became almost impossible to compete with google photos and yeah i'm sure google is operating at a loss here uh that's probably why in june 2021 a payment plan is going to kick in and maybe that's why you know in this hypothetical world we're working in amazon photos actually wants to um introduce free storage as as a way for people to to opt for it because they might start paying for for google photos so yeah that's from a landscape point of view google photos seems like now the the clear winner i think they have 1.2 billion people using the product or something like that um if i have to think about you know purchase five here doesn't really apply alternatives and substitutes uh you know the best thing is to there aren't really much because people can either keep photos on their phones or need to upload them into google photos which you know that's how a lot of people do they have like this auto upload uh going on um yeah and so that's one of the advantages of google photos just does things in the in the background um and if i were to if i were to stop here and think a bit about the customers that use this i think android users have a definite advantage i think pix people who own a pixel um definitely you know get a get special pricing or three months three months for free or i think also unlimited storage for the high quality images so they're they're privileged in in a way and then all other users also are getting unlimited storage right now but maybe not for the high quality images is as far as as i remember and moving on to the use cases so keeping these customers in mind if i think about the use cases what customers are looking for are a few things like they want you know free storage right so basically the job to be done here or the use case is store the next one is search uh they they simply want to search for their old pictures like find them and be be able to find the specific pictures a specific specific picture a specific moment and i think google is really like is getting really really good at that and the thing about to almost like organize and curate just like they would in the um analog world just create albums and things like that so keeping things these things in mind um and knowing that google photos is delivering on all of these um i want to jump into what is it that differentiates google photos and amazon photos and really it's not you know amazon photos yet it's really amazon at large um if i were to think about amazon yeah one of the things that come to mind is the general i'm going to call it generosity or you know i don't want to call it cheap but but amazon is very competitive when it comes to pricing so it's a very generous company uh prime almost feels like a steel right it's almost like uh uh irrational to not to not pay for amazon prime at this stage and so it has its generosity it also has a great bundle of of products with prime so prime you know prime is very it is a great uh is a great proposition in that in that sense uh if i were to think about amazon's weaknesses however i think from a ux and ui perspective just as a product it's a bit confusing um the social aspect is definitely not one of amazon's forte like they don't have a social graph whereas like photos are very much um are a very social product um if i were to think about google photos weaknesses i do think actually also google doesn't have strong social graph hasn't captured that unfortunately um another thing i can think of is um people just like almost like a consumer apathy as in people don't always like rely more on their phones to store all of these photos or maybe on some arcane ways like a usb etc so either apathy or ignorance and that's what keeping people from using google photos and so integrating into phones like pixel is very powerful um makes me almost think like you know is there a potential with drive for instance jumping to ideas for a bit here but just yeah so i can be leveraged drive basically to really capture everyone automatically capture everyone's pictures and get them into the product like an acquisition mechanism and then from strength i think this is that that's the juicy part as in google from a machine learning you know google's technology assistant technology uh intelligence around context is um is second to none and it's definitely something that can be leveraged here there's also a very strong ecosystem there's gmail and maps and um um so many um what else uh there we have chrome um other products that people use on a daily basis everything from trips to notes to et cetera uh so a lot of products you know that that are that can be leveraged here to basically enforce uh google photos and looking at this and everything we've already talked about what i would like to do is you know to start pinning down a strategy here to answer your question so as a pm for google photos knowing that amazon is about to launch free storage what would i do um i would want to so for amazon's weaknesses i want to you know hammer their weaknesses or like attack counter uh press press against their weaknesses make sense i would want to minimize my own weaknesses as a google footage product um i want to co-opt not copy go out or like get inspiration from amazon's generosity and bundle in prime and then when it comes to my strengths i want to leverage my strengths right i want to lean into these strengths and so that's the do you think the weakness do you think the weakness of social graph or the lack of social graph is something that's really important if you were to sort of rank the weaknesses where where might you put these different weaknesses yeah excellent question that's that's exactly what i what i had in mind to do because there are there is a lot here so of all of these things what should i leverage what should i minimize et cetera um so oh sorry so let's start with minimize actually to your question between consumer apathy and ignorance and social graph uh that's a great question because i it forces me to take a step back here and think about google google photoscopes right um if we are in a competitive landscape like this like this hypothetical scenario then immediately the goal becomes uh both acquisition uh really actually revisiting this not not acquisition as much as engagements as in we want to create the goal then becomes to create a strategic mode as fast as possible and by emote i mean something that's very defensible so that amazon photos cannot you know just come create another commodity product for free storage and take over our market um and so of these two between consumer applications social graph i think you know we will always compete on we will always build the same tools as amazon everyone will build the same tools to get people to get to upload their photos to their system but a social graph is not something that's easily repeatable so i would want to focus on that uh primarily yeah that's how i would uh prioritize these two so what do you think is the for for google photos today and what do you think is the moat for amazon good question um i think the so the mode for google photos today has been for the longest time that it has captured a lot of uh people's existing photos so that the cost of moving one's photos is high um but and so it's almost like this it almost feels like this is the only mode like the mode right now is just convenience or the pain of moving my photos to somewhere else and that's my my opinion is that it is not enough of a mode we need to to create another another mode layer or whatever we want to call it and that's that's where the strategy comes in yeah for amazon right right so so i was going to ask as you were going to go in the direction of uh you're not the pm for amazon and we don't really know what amazon photos looks like but if you were to guess what might amazon's moat like if you were a pm what do you think they would try to make the mode yeah yeah um i would say i do think they would double down on this generosity bundle uh you know advantage they have so um things that could come to mind is if you start storing your pictures for free with us uh you might have a discount on your prime membership your prime membership costs you less that's pretty extreme to be honest um rather we could print a photo book for free for you uh amazon probably ha you know already has kdp kindle direct publishing so they could do that whereas google photos charges to print all of these pictures today right uh so that that is the kind of um edge that amazon would have uh really offering things for free or for a very competitive price great so thanks for breaking that down so now it looks like so you've underlined social graph is that the weakness you sort of want to focus on i do this i do think it's a it's one of them but it's i do think it's a multi-prone approach so the way i would line um um uh line this up is the following something like this so uh where we could even add actually an extra column here so call this pros and cons maybe we won't go too much into details but basically what i keep in mind as i go through this is one i want to make sure that we're building a strategic mode right so that's what i'm going to evaluate each of these ideas based on and number two i want to lean into my strengths and lead into google strengths right and make sure we're you know we're playing to these and so ideas that come to mind are inspired by this one when it comes to the social graph for instance uh one thing that i find strange is that i can identify people in in google but i don't have their gmail right so like can so i don't have their gmail and google doesn't know who they are so they don't so almost like asking people yeah i feel i'm rushing into this one um i'll take them if that's okay uh stephen i'll take a minute just to gather my ideas here how does that sound yeah i'm kevin kevin sorry no worries go ahead no worries take your time kevin i'll take a minute to think through this thanks awesome okay great um so here are the three things apologies for for the name thing um so here are the things that come to mind the first one is i'm just going to thematize them so the first one called i'd call social intelligence as in understanding relationships between people present in pictures the reason why this is important is because you know we could build almost like social street systems if i'm in a picture very often with someone um google could deduce that this person is important to me and so create an album or suggest things that are truly uh that just highlight my relationship with this person versus just tell me what happened a year ago right and so uh almost like double double down or highlight important relationships i'll keep it broad for a second here and we can double click into it if you'd like the second one would be something around contextual intelligence and this leverages this part that i spoke about earlier which is the ecosystem um for instance if i'm in you know if i'm in maps right and i'm in i'm visiting um let's say las vegas again terrible example uh uh google google photos should could show me basically the last time i was in vegas uh rather maps could show me like the photos of the last time i was in vegas i'm sure you know there are some cons here regarding like privacy and i know that there's almost like a china wall between the different um uh between the different products at at google so i would keep that in mind but you know the last time uh you were in vegas would be a kind you know something to increase that contextual intelligence because that's something amazon will never offer me amazon doesn't have access to maps uh same for um i'd say you know other things it's like time so google has notes for instance um maybe it could remind me of um a picture a picture i took maybe as a as a reminder if i can tag a picture it's a loose idea but you know effectively relating maybe notes in some way um connecting notes to photos um it's a blurry idea i'll pass on this one and scratch it for now but basically an idea to connect you know more of google photos and the last one is um this one inspire you know inspiration and specifically the the bundle the prime bundle thing uh idea google has google one today and so uh bundling photos into google one in a very advantageous way and advantageous way though people have to pay for it would be like would be an essential move in my opinion here um and i think the three the three of these would be like the basis the the starting strategy uh to to to get at this and to create created defenses against uh against the risk of free storage proposed by amazon let's double click into the highlight important relationships um i'm not really clear what that means yeah that sounds good so um what i meant by that is if you click on search in google photos you'll see people's faces right on top as circles um and google photos would even ask you to you know whether whether this is the right person in that photo et cetera but effectively you know google photos recognizes people's in in photos um and you can even name them so i've called my you know my friend david etc uh what what is interesting in in this case is to um go go a level deeper into that and so either either one one of two things one um on the main page of photos right now there are stories so what happened a year ago what happened two years ago on this day instead highlighting uh what i've done with friends at this time uh what i've done in friends at a specific place or um you know how long it's been or even statistics about uh you know you've taken that many pictures with this person versus that many pictures with this other person and almost like a um snapchats streak system showing me effectively how my friendship stack up against each other how much time i'm spending it with people the second one um google photos has a messenger option now where you can message other people it would be interesting to just you know in these messages um pre-populate some messages for the people who matter most to me so if it's david and if i identify them as david maybe link it to their gmail and then be able to send an album on a specific day to gmail and send me a notification uh to david my friend telling him on this day we spent you know this time together in colombia and we did x and y and z so auto creating memories not only for my uh viewing but to connect with people and so going a step further and then just creating memories and curating these to help me connect with people around memories i think that is the the shift there um yeah that's what i had in mind for this one okay um that's really interesting i'm kind of curious which one you might pick of all of these that's a great question so that's where the pros and cons comes in uh i do think there's a the the one that jumps at me from a cons perspective is this whole privacy around contextual intelligence um i'm not sure how much uh i'm not knowledgeable enough about how much different google products can talk to each other so i'd be a bit wary about this one the pros however is that you know from a strategic mode perspective it's truly you know very defensible uh very hard to replicate right so that's one uh google one i think it's a you know it's almost an easy one now i'm questioning whether these are the right columns it's almost like you know effort we could rename them to effort risk um and then impact something like that that will make things easier uh and so very hard to replicate this is what is that that's i guess impact slash strategic importance um so from an effort perspective i do think this one is kind of medium uh i don't think it's too hard to implement contextual this is a high one google one photos this is a easy one so low um risk is a medium in this case because we would be asking users approval at each stage i do think the importance is high in this case impact is high very hard to applicate this would be high but the risk is high as well and then google one photos the risk is low and the impact would be medium rather than low so this just gives me you know an a high level idea about social intelligence being the id the the thing to go for um but i i would still in in a given strategy i would want to uh so i would suggest social intelligence as a thing we would start with but i would want contextual intelligence as something we look into as well um because it is it is kind of longer-term investment that can truly differentiate our product in the future yeah so social intelligence sort of like um nostalgia kind of feature where you're using machine learning also okay interesting yeah you you did point out that that was one of google strengths on the photos team um great yeah um so in the past google has definitely tried to add social aspects to its products like google circles and google plus right um what sort of learning lessons might you think we can take from that and make sure we don't fail in the same realm when we're trying to build these sort of social features here yeah that's a great question i'm sure there's a postmortem somewhere internally about this um let me i'll take a few seconds to think through this one so a few things actually that come to mind having worked at facebook for for a while uh when it comes to sharing and to social dynamics there are actually some key principles that um that social products use and and leverage um i'll start with a couple of lessons that google needs to keep and would need to keep in mind in this case one the importance of building on an existing use case rather than building a completely new uh new product that almost is you know parachuted onto people and so in this case it would be you know instead of building a google plus rather uh building on top of something that already has a lot of value that people are used so google photos for instance right number two is keeping it simple uh circles did introduce this idea of being able to create circles uh or google plus introduced circles which was great and made a lot of sense um however there was an amount of investment to to kick things off right and so in this case we would need that single core feature that we built to be as simple as possible uh something that that's very easy and i think our technology our assistant our social and the social intelligence would help us get there the third one is mimicry um you know social networks thrive on mimikrys so and and i think that's that's one that's going to be hard to solve in this case uh unfortunately because google photos is a very private product it isn't the social public product and so we would we would need to create um either give people a way to export whatever you know artifact they create within google photos or even create a mini network of sorts within google photos or ground friends so like almost like google photos could become this new uh this new uh smaller a social network a private social network of sorts um yeah but these these are so building on an existing use case keeping it simple and mimicry are the three things i would keep in mind great and uh do you think that your social intelligence feature here uh hits on these that you've just mentioned yeah great great question i do think it builds on an existing use case i do think it keeps it simple uh when it comes to mimicry i would need i like we could go into a complete tangent on product design basically but there there there's more to bake into here to to make sure that there is because at this stage i i'll i'll just so the assistant will suggest an album uh for me to share with my friend david based on their gmail uh but then after that what happens right will david share back with me we'll have a conversation but no one outside of this interaction will actually uh will actually do that so there's there's more to to dig into there maybe leveraging photos where there are multiple people and you know creating conversation with multiple people uh that would help with the the viral factor okay great um so i think you've already mentioned some risks here um if you want um feel free to mention some more but if if that was everything why don't we move on to success yeah i think uh i think i've covered enough enough risk especially around this you know using several uh google products as part of the strategy uh when it comes to success and the way i would evaluate whether this is uh the right the right next move um what i would do is go back to where we started so we spoke about engagement as the um the goal that what what google photos would is needs to accomplish now to defend itself against any any future strategic threat such as amazon etc and so looking back with um how would we measure success right if if it's engagement what is engagement in this case um is it simply there are quite a few things you know that define engagement in google photos and it's not just scrolling through through the photos on the main page it's probably search um or sending an album to a friend it it's it is you know even like new new people who download google photos after uh after a friend shares uh and so that would track virality and this would be you know these these almost track almost like a funnel these steps that i i would want to look look at uh and these would guarantee that people are investing more time in the product it's not simply that they're uh that they're opening the app or that they're you know looking for or that they're passively uploading things they're actively invested in the photo and that's the difference that you want to introduce here and then from a more you know so these are the actual actions and then from a more lagging as a lagging metric i would go for attention so week on week um users who do any of the you know who engage basically do any of the actions i i listed above is this number going up or down i think that's how it would determine whether this is successful or not one last point maybe is about the execution i would start in a maybe in a single country um a test for a couple of months keep the test small and see the results yeah great um thanks for this great mock interview i think we can pause here and before i give you some feedback i'd love to hear if you might have any um self-reflection on how you think the mock interview did and just any general advice and tips for people who are watching yeah thank you um let's see i uh i do feel from a structure perspective um uh i i i almost lost sight of the objective here at in a few in a few spots and i think i spent a bit too much time just going into details uh which i'm not sure were very irrelevant to just answering the question um so there was a loss of focus in a in a few at a few moments besides that i think i i finally got us to the right place i don't know if i was leading enough versus being led by your questions so i was a bit self-conscious about that um yeah but in general i'm i'm happy with my my answer great yeah i definitely felt like you did a good job leading so that's a good uh signal there for you and you started off by white boarding which is excellent especially during a virtual interview you talked about reporters fight forces use cases you tied the mission into the problem and you spoke about the moats which i thought was really important and you also thought about you know you're not a pm at amazon but you also thought about what amazon potentially if you put yourself in in their shoes what they might do to create a moat for amazon photos and one thing that i really liked was that you called out privacy this is a very important theme for photos and i was very happy that even though you mentioned a social feature you did call out that privacy was important um i think that just one uh improvement that i would call out is or maybe two is maybe dive a little bit deeper into some of the designs so maybe walk me through if this is my first time using this feature what does it look like um you you know i'll give you some credit here like you definitely gave me the chance to say like hey like if we have time we can double click here so you definitely give me the option there as the interviewer to look at that but that's one piece of feedback and then the second and last one is um even though this is just like a mock interview um if this were a real interview i'm sure you would spend some more time maybe pausing and asking uh some more questions and allowing me to just make sure that we're on the same page yeah that's great feedback all in all this is a great great mock interview i'm really happy to that you took your time to share your expertise with the audience and before we wrap up do you have any final advice for people who are watching yeah we're thinking about that today um reflecting on how important it is to get to the point where it feels like fun to just do these interviews or to just prep for all of this um but yeah to keep that in mind like if it's not fun anymore maybe there's something wrong or you know one needs to take a break yeah i think it's super important definitely wise words thanks so much and for the audience watching at home good luck with your upcoming pm interview thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out hundreds more videos just like this at tryexponent.com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview

Channel: Exponent

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Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021