Curriculum - Google Product Manager Mock Interview: Biggest Threat to YouTube

what's the biggest threat to youtube's business over the next let's say three to five years [Music] hey everyone i'm kevin way i'm a product manager at ibm data and ai today we have a mock pm interview with matt suskind before we jump into today's question matt can you tell us a little bit about yourself sure so i'm a former google associate product manager uh spent a lot of time on the other side of the interviewing table and now i'm a coach for exponent awesome well we're super excited to have you here and today we're doing

a product strategy and a little bit of execution type question so for this question matt what's the biggest threat to youtube's business over the next let's say three to five years so just to break down the way that i'm gonna go through this uh the way i'll structure my answer is first i just want to talk about youtube as a business you know what's important there what do we need to know about youtube uh in order to talk about the threats that they would be facing um then i want to dive into what some of

those threats would be uh both from the broader landscape and also you know especially from their competitors uh and then you know once i've explained that i want to go through and prioritize which i think is going to be the biggest uh you know based on that understanding of youtube that we laid out and what i know about their uh their threats and their landscape how does that sound sounds good okay great so to start out i just want to talk about youtube's business um you know this uh they have a couple different lines of

revenue um but the main one is advertising that's where they make most of their money um and you know most of their users are free and so i kind of want to dive into that a little bit deeper the way that business works is basically users come to the platform to watch content that's created by creators uh and then advertisers are monetizing on those views right they're inserting ads uh for whatever products uh based on the relationship between the users and the creators uh and so you know i think that's kind of the the fundamental

set of relationships at the core of what drives youtube's business is uh that the users come for the content the content creators are there because they can get the views and allows them to either build an audience or to make money off of it and then the advertisers are there because then they can advertise to those users and so uh you know i think that anything that's going to be a major threat to youtube right it's going to threaten that major revenue stream is in somehow in some way going to threaten this relationship between the

three in some way um you know i think some of the biggest strengths that youtube has just to just to put these out there so i can reference them later uh it's the name in video hosting and you know video platforms right it's it's sort of the biggest site on the youtube on the internet uh for a video if i'm going to post a video if i'm going to share a video if i'm going to look for a video i'm going to go to youtube and so that name brand that recognition that positioning is really

important and it's a big uh lever that continues to be an advantage for them um you know obviously it's really easy to post a youtube video um it's a well-known place where creators can make a lot of money and so that attracts creators to try and uh you know put their videos there as well um and it's got the strength of google behind it so when it comes to advertisers one google already has really strong relations with a lot of these advertisers and two uh it allows them to be a lot more intelligent in the

way that they connect advertisers to users and content so you know after you know this understanding of youtube and their business i want to start talking a little bit more about you know the actual threats that we see out there how does that sound yeah these strengths sound good so let's move on to that okay great so um obviously they're going to be major threats for the competitors and i do want to get into that but just before i dive in there i do want to talk about some of the other threats that might exist

uh you know for youtube because they're such a large company uh they are they have global scale and so things that happen on a global level uh can you can impact their business so uh the regulations that different countries put out can have an impact on them i'm thinking of things like gdpr right there uh data concerns that will affect their ability for to to help advertisers target or you know to collect data on users which would help them monetize off of them uh it may have concerns for content you know uh basically larger political

regulations like that might affect their business or if you know a country like china uh you know decides to block them out that's a huge market that they don't have access to uh so i'll put that as one category as political and regulatory um i think that there are also some social concerns um you know certainly people are talking about the effects that social media uh and content have had on democracy and on discourse and you know a lot of that has focused on facebook um but there are definitely been concerns about that from youtube's

side as well you know like kind of dragging people into uh you know alt-right rabbit holes and things like that and so i think that there's a chance for social uh backlash against youtube for that people deciding to boycott or you know not want to use it it could impact advertisers because they don't want to be associated with those kinds of videos um you know there's content moderation issues around comments uh you know there's concern around youtube kids and things like that and so i'd say that there's a whole section of concerns that would be

related to whether or not people are would want to boycott the platform whether from the user side or from the advertiser side and then you know from the creator side those kinds of issues would be more around you know their uh whether or not they're being censored or de-prioritized by the algorithm and you know whether that drives them to other platforms all that being said i think that there are more specific threats that come from their actual competitive field um and if we look at youtube as a whole they are in so many different verticals

that you could build a long list of competitors you know they're in education so you might say coursera they're in their cooking videos and so you might say things like bon appetit or you know new york times cooking things like that but i would say to their core business there's a pretty clear set of competitors that are in very much that video space that are probably going to be their most important threats and so uh you know in the arena of video hosting video platforms sort of on the same level of youtube uh is vimeo

um i would say as you get into shorter form content uh more on the social side you know there's instagram and tick tock um and then as you look higher up uh sort of the the level of production value going up you get into that premium content that netflix amazon and companies like that have um i think just to dive into youtube's position within this field a little bit because i think that'll be useful to understand youtube kind of sits in the middle of a value chain here if we look at sort of the cost

to reduce content the quality of content um certainly youtube has a huge range but their bread and butter seems to be sort of in in the middle you know it's it's not super short form it's not as short as a tick tock video it's not as short as you might see on instagram um maybe more in that like 10 minutes to 30 minutes uh range it does have you know fairly high production value you do have to put money in to make something high quality on youtube these days and then you know up above where

you're spending a lot more uh money on content for you know premium hollywood content is where you have like the netflix's and amazon's and so youtube is kind of squeezed in the middle here and i would say that uh you know to understand what's going to be the biggest threat we need to understand you know what where should youtube be making money where could one of these move into youtube space and then how is that going to affect the kind of money that youtube makes so uh just to start diving into this prioritization i want

to bring back up that triangle that i started with you know the users the creators and the advertisers because i think the thing that's going to make something a big threat to youtube as i mentioned is something that affects that relationship in some way right what is going to pull our users away uh and bring them onto other platforms what is going to going to drive our creators to other platforms or what might make it harder or make it unappealing for our advertisers to be here honestly i think the advertisers are probably the easiest out

of this triangle because they just want to be wherever they're going to have eyeballs and so as long as we're making sure that we have users our advertisers will come along and so i think i'm i'm probably not going to be as worried about them within within this prioritization but when i think about these users and creators uh from the netflix and amazon perspective they're not really going to be stealing our creators um you know it's just it's a different art form right the kind of content that you get the vlogs or you know uh

web series and things like that don't really translate to that hollywood world quite as much sure some people break through but they're not really going to see our creators but they might be taking our users just in terms of the the fact that people only have so much time to spend in a day and so if you're spending that time watching netflix shows you're not watching youtube content and so because that content is so high quality they are known for having a lot of great content that would be a threat that we want to consider

when i look at the lower quality end of the spectrum the instagrams and the tick tocks i start to get more concerned for youtube because i think that they might hit us in two ways one uh you know as we think about you know the younger generation uh that for a long time youtube had a really strong hold on now we do see a lot of them you know being more interested in tick tock and instagram right these are really social platforms uh there's a lot more conversation happening there and uh i think in certain

ways they are capturing the the minds of the younger generations so they could be stealing our users uh and then uh if we consider the creator side um they have really lowered barriers that uh that at one point youtube was really the easiest place to be creating and now they've lowered barriers for creators even further right youtube made it really easy to distribute so a lot of people flock to the platform but now uh it's becoming even easier to get an audience play on places like uh tick tock tick tock and instagram and so you

know if what these uh creators care about is building an audience being able to monetize being able to grow their reach um you know i think that these platforms really have an advantage i'm especially thinking you know from the case of tick-tock they think it's so easy to create a video right it's on your phone their editing tools are super simple they're so easy that 16 year olds make you know pretty good videos on tiktok and so i think that they definitely have a wedge that they could drive uh at youtube where they can really

start to pull in these creators and say hey for less investment you're going to get bigger reach and you're going to have a bigger uh yeah you'll just end up with a bigger audience for for your efforts i think that's a really really strong appeal to creators so all of that being said i am debating between tech talk and instagram and even though tick tock has their great creator tools i am still gonna say that i think instagram is the bigger threat uh mainly because they are they are in a similar space to tick-tock uh

they recently created reels which is you know supposed to be their tick-tock competitor uh you know from playing around with it it's not quite as good as tick tock yet that's for sure but they do have the force of facebook behind them uh facebook obviously has these really strong relationships with advertisers as well it very much ties into their business model to you know continue to steal these users and creators from uh from youtube and even though you know it's not quite the same kind of video platform i think the social aspect of it makes

it so easy to get rich makes it so easy for users to bring in other users that uh in a lot of ways uh it makes it makes a lot of sense to be a creator on a platform like this do you think creators care more about reaching their viewers or do you think some creators would care more about finding the platform that is helping them monetize yeah that's a good question uh it i definitely generalized the two of them together there but there are different reasons that reasons that creators create so you know some

uh do it because they want to be influencers right they wanna they wanna be a big name they they want to get sort of like this uh this newer version of being a celebrity um and that's all about reach really and you can turn that into money in certain ways but i think for them the motivation is that reach um then there are people who are either they are part of you know businesses or they are just somebody who is more motivated but more motivated by the money in which case uh they're trying to to

find ways to monetize and i would bet that for now youtube is the better place to monetize i think with that longer form content you kind of make an argument that you have uh you have more of the user's attention you know you can put more ads in uh it's probably easier to do sponsored deals or at least make more money off of them um and so i think for now if you have an audience already then youtube is a great place to be but i think that if you're an up-and-coming person whether you're interested

in that reach or in monetization uh instagram is going to make a really strong uh case for why you should be on their platform okay so to summarize it sounds like the hypothesis your or the argument you're making is that for younger um users the biggest threat would then be instagram it's a lower barrier tool to create content and uh we're seeing much more engagement there rather than if these up and coming creators are creating on youtube so there's this threat where they might be more attracted to instagram right uh that's from the creator side

and then from the user's side i think just the social aspect of it the fact that you know uh instagram is much more of a social platform i can open it up start looking through pictures my influencers come up i can discover new people there you know people are sending me posts uh it seems like things have an easier time going viral more quickly on instagram and that's going to lead to more engagement that's going to lead to uh users spending more time on instagram versus youtube where you know you have to be you either

have to be in a mode where you want to watch long videos and find these kinds of things or somebody has to send you a video which is usually off platform so there's a little bit of an extra step there's some action at a distance there okay interesting so let's assume that you are a pm at youtube how would you mitigate this threat um and i think to start with managing this uh i do just want to reiterate some of the advantages that i see instagram having you know the ways that they that they actually

and make that they actually become a threat to youtube because i think we're going to have to mitigate those specifically in order to actually deal with this threat um and then i'll talk about you know some of the ways that we might do that so uh the kinds of things that i've been talking about here are you know the social aspect of instagram obviously you know that's a core function uh that it's a social network um there's the appeal to younger generations i think that comes from both the other users who are on the site

the kind of content that gets promoted uh the the way the product has been designed to allow for really quick engagement and then i think the other major uh theme in my answer here has been that they have an advantage in the easier creation right because that content is shorter because the expectations for production value are lower uh it there's a lower barrier to entry so it's easier to be creating content for uh instagram and all of these obviously are uh our concerns that youtube would have and now the question becomes you know how do

we deal with that as youtube and i think fundamentally youtube the product it is today doesn't quite uh isn't quite set up to deal with that right you know to make youtube a really socially you know a social first product would require massive changes to the product and all that is possible um but you know there still are a lot of advantages that youtube has um and things it does well that you might lose by uh by going down that route and kind of throwing throwing everything out so i would say that it might make

sense uh to come up with either an axillary auxiliary product you know something uh a new product that's more in the vein of these quicker videos or to you know go out and acquire uh a company that's already growing in that space you know obviously there's a huge bidding war for tick tock right now um and you know uh it might make sense for google to enter that fray right because again it shores up that that lower quality space that youtube has kind of been more and more pushed out of so that could be an

option for how we deal with it but if we were going to design a product you know build something in this space i would say that the thing that we want to aim for is how can we get creators onto the platform with as little uh effort needed to create for it as possible right again tick tocks creator tools are such a big deal for them because now a 16 year old goes out shoots some video on their phone and now they can just edit it directly there and so i don't want to say that

youtube should copy that but they should take inspiration from that right what is uh the kind of content that these kinds of users want to create um you know and then how can we make that more social uh i think that a lot of users in this in this space they they kind of just want to share their experience right and so maybe if we can come up with a product that makes it really easy to you know to i pause because i think i'm about to describe snapchat um you know something that makes it

really easy to just share what you're up to to create great content out of that and then you know kind of create social moments around you know that experience that you're happening that you're having um and as as i was saying that i was realizing that's a lot of what snapchat did well you know it's not quite as popular now i think because it was so isolated and it was more about you know either you're posting to a story or just communicating one-to-one but if you could have something that built in the advantages of a

social network right you're posting to a more permanent place but you're still showing off hey here's what i'm up to you allow people to to really easy easily edit that together and then you know share that out i think that would both appeal to younger users it would make it a lot more social and it would uh help people create content really quickly for it so so you you mentioned that the to mitigate this threat we have to either do one of three things we have to address the social aspect the appeal to gen z

or this uh making it easier to edit perhaps some sort of mobile editing um way to lower the barrier of entry to creating content so if you were the pm which one would you choose to prioritize sure um you know just to you know to to be complete here i do want to say i think in the best case you you find a way to do all three right they're not they're not independent of each other and they can all support each other if you have the right product that being said to answer your question

um i would say that probably the biggest uh thing would be making it easy to create for these platforms right because the thing i keep i keep coming back to here is that youtube is kind of getting squeezed out of this cheaper you know easier to produce content it's losing out on a lot of creators uh who can't produce for youtube and so i think that's going to be uh you know the fundamental gap that youtube wants to fill and i think if you do that that will appeal to a lot of the younger creators

and their younger fans in gen z um and then the social aspects of it you know people will talk about videos they already talk about youtube videos as well you can build in features to make it more easily social but i think the core of it really is going to be that ease of creation and being able to grow a lot of content because of it yeah i i don't totally agree with that so yeah because if you think about youtube we know that they have tried having some sort of feed like the social aspect

of instagram it didn't work too well they're still having it it kind of turned more into like a forum and um this appeal to a younger generation there there is youtube for kids so maybe there's some potential there um but yeah um to circle back with the advantage and easier creation i would say that that is what i would prioritize as well so let's sort of black box the the solution or the the some sort of tool that we would make um assuming that this tool was made what are some of the success metrics that

you would take a look at to figure out if youtube actually is after coming out with this new product or this new tool what are the metrics to show that uh you know as the pm yes we are making it easier for creators to create so um as you asked you know if we have this solution and we're gonna measure that we're doing a good job making it easier to create videos you know how we go about measuring that um i think for this product overall there are lots of other things that we'd want to

measure as well just to make sure the product as a whole is healthy but i do agree that that most important goal is making it easier to create and so i'm going to focus my metrics in that direction for this discussion is that okay that's okay yep okay great so um here we're already starting with a you know a relatively clear goal right uh we are trying to make it easy for people to create content uh we're thinking of sort of this shorter form you know less uh less lower production value content um and so

uh yeah i i think that's actually succinct enough as a goal already we're just trying to make it easier for them to create this kind of content um i i want to talk about what that looks like you know before i go into the specific metrics i want to talk through what are the things we expect to see what's true in this world if we're achieving that goal because i think that'll help me uh understand what are the metrics that tell us that that's actually happening and so the kinds of actions the kinds of things

that i expect users to be doing one is to be you know i would expect there to be a lot of videos on the platform right if we've done a good job make it easy to create there's going to be an explosion of content um i think that we're going to find that uh people create content regularly because it's easy right if you create one video and it's super hard you're just not going to create more unless it's really really worth it so if we've actually lowered that barrier we're going to see that more creators

create more content regularly and we'll see more creators getting into that space um i think we're also going to see that with our inbuilt tools they're just not going to spend as much time editing um you know certainly there are going to be some people who push it to the limits uh but for the most part uh you know uh a big sign of our success is that somebody's going to be able to take video and you know within 20 seconds they have something that's you know pretty decent especially you know for content that's maybe

only going to be 30 seconds to a minute long so to reiterate those uh actions those you know those markers that i'm talking about it would be lots of videos uh it would be a broad set of users who are creating regularly and then it's going to be uh you know quick editing time so the specific metrics that we'd be looking at there i think they fall out pretty neatly so starting with that first one that would just be you know number of videos uh we would want to see um you know depending over the

time frame that we're looking at or how we exactly how exactly we want to measure this but we'd be looking at something like the growth uh in the number of videos and i think that'll be a pretty clear measure of you know how easy it is to create because the easier it is you know the more more videos we're gonna have so when you say growth of new videos are you comparing this to another old metric that we had um well in this case you know we were thinking i was talking about a new product

and so there won't really be you know existing data from that we obviously have youtube as a whole which is a huge platform so there's not really going to be an apples to apples comparison but i would say that we would just like to see uh you know that uh we have lots of new videos coming onto the platform every day i don't know that there's a great previous comparison just because youtube is such a different animal and it's already a huge uh source of videos but it might be that you know we we want

to see a growth that's trending towards the number of new videos especially because they're short uh being greater than the number of videos that youtube is having posted daily yeah that makes sense the second one that i was talking about you know a broad set of creators creating regularly there's a couple different metrics that fall out of that um i think we would want to look at you know some sort of number of active creators like how many creators have posted a new video in say the past week if this is short form content and

we expect to be posting pretty regularly that seems like a reasonable uh length of time that we would consider that we want people to be actively posting um we might look at uh how many uh retained creators we have you know how many uh or what percentage of creators post another video within like the first week after their creation their their initial video um [Music] uh so i was talking about a broad set of videos by by a broad set of creators and so um yeah seeing that retention in terms of posting seeing how many

active creators we have i think those are going to be yeah those are the two big metrics there in my mind okay and the last one you said was less time spent editing yeah sounds like it's a little bit harder to measure um i'd love to hear any thoughts that you would have on measuring this yeah i mean the really straightforward way that you know might miss out on some nuance is just you know from the moment they click like edit to the moment that they click post for a particular set for a particular video

you know i imagine we'll have drafts and things but that amount of time they spend from when they decide to start putting clips together to when they feel that they've edited it and feel good about you know what that product is and post it uh you know i we would want that to be as short as possible um for uh for the general case you know obviously some people will spend more time editing to get higher quality content we don't want to incentivize super quick editing because we don't want everything to come out as trash

and so you know we might we might put some guard rails on that around you know uh maybe we're only looking at like the the top you know 80 percent of quality or something like that if we want to make it more complicated but i think the core of it is going to be just what is that time between i press the edit button and i post uh the the finished version of this project i'm working on got it cool that makes sense um thanks matt so that's the question and thanks for the answer and

before i give my feedback looking back would love to hear your self-reflection how you thought this mock interview went sure uh thanks for asking so i think uh on the whole uh i liked my approach to it i think uh you know i felt pretty good about the argument i was building um and you know that it all kind of made sense within the context of what's really important to youtube uh you know what's actually going to be a strategic threat and how do we understand that these are threats um i think when it came

to the how would we mitigate this um i think i did a good job breaking down uh what youtube needs to focus on but i don't think the i don't think i gave a very clear and specific answer for what that solution would actually be um you know i think i think i had good elements within there but i could have wrapped it up more cohesively into a more clear product um and so i wasn't super happy with that um and then as far as the metrics go um you know i i was rushing a

little bit just to try and make it within time but i i think those actions that i broke out make a lot of sense and i think the metrics are pretty straightforward for measuring it i definitely could have gotten more nuanced and i think there are more interesting ways to measure some of those that might tell us more about what users are actually doing but i think as a first pass all of those metrics will be useful for understanding whether our creator tools are doing what they're supposed to yeah they definitely pass like just my

sanity test thinking about if they make sense or not um all in all i do like the structure so we started out by talking about strengths and weaknesses and we talked about some concerns so you brought up the concerns from competitors but beyond you know the those concerns social concerns created concerns and then we talked about the biggest threat so here you talked about instagram one thing that i think i would do is i would mention the for you page on tick tock that's like the biggest part of tick tock and i think even if

yeah you know we assume that the interviewer would know what it is it's so good to call it out and yeah um since it's like kind of the crux of the argument as to why discovery is so easy on tick tock so yeah would have called that out is good and also talking about the the um social concerns when we talk about some of the political discourse um you know it might encourage people to go into alt-right rabbit holes i think another concern that is very common in consumer tech today's addictiveness i think that's something

that is good to call out as well um and something that i like about your framework is that you you have this tendency to go broad and then deep um so an example of this would be like in the metrics where instead of just jumping straight into i think the best metric is number of new videos or i think than you know number of new active creators i really like how you talk about the idea you broadly talk about this idea we want to see an explosion of content we want to see less time being

spent editing we want to see a broader set of users and then diving into how to quantify that idea i think that's something that we can all learn from and apply uh just the one thing that i would do there i know that we were short on time but one thing i would do is after talking about these ideas i would really pinpoint a north star as to um like which one i would focus on and it's it's hard you know to pinpoint one at two because this is a big this is a new product

right you can't have just one metric that tells you how successful it is but it would be useful yeah yeah that's the only good point i did intend to do that and then ran out of time unfortunately but it's super helpful and you know uh as much as you know all of the the whys and the reasoning behind it are important um and you know that's definitely something that i dive into at the end of the day you know you need to make a specific choice you need to have an answer to a question and

you need to be able to show why you prioritize you know what all of those why's and understanding of the problem actually led to in terms of the actions you take as a pm absolutely and at the end of the day for these interviews the as long as the solution sounds sane um the most important part is how you're getting to the solution because obviously as the interviewee you don't have all the insights that the pm has at the at the company at youtube