Google’s Product Strategy Interview

one of the toughest product interview questions are what should company X build in five years in this video I'm going to walk you through a foolproof framework and an example to help you tackle this question so you Ace your product interviews so we're actually going to tackle what should Google build in the next five years and this is tough because Google has built so much what haven't they touched so we're gonna first start off with talking about Google's business and what is Google's Mission it is to organize the world information and make it universally accessible

and useful so some themes that they care about as you can tell from their mission statement which I think is pretty unique is one they care about organizing the world's information they care about knowledge second they care about Universal accessibility that as many people can access knowledge information whatever they need as much as possible and you see this through their next billion users effort that they invested in where they're trying to bring other people in emerging markets in places where internet is not accessible bringing the services to them and the last theme is usefulness they

want to make sure that these products are useful or make a difference in a person's life so my tip here is it's really important to actually understand and break out the mission because you're going to use this to set and maybe develop Solutions and a vision for your product which we'll talk about later on next you want to spend a little bit of time understanding the company's products so here again Google has developed so many products I'm going to split them out into a couple different domains from Hardware software their platform products and Innovation products

for example on their software products it's things like video YouTube things like Google Maps Gmail Google workspace which is really the Google Docs Drive pieces of the product of course they're key Flagship product that they started off with Google search and ads which you built search to monetize off of on their harder products they've also built so much in the last decades they've built the mobile pixel phone they've invested in home devices like buying nests and then developing Google home which I have one they built a platform by buying a small company that turned into

their Android platform and we all know they have innovated in self-driving cars being one of the early ones to invest and in other Innovations such as the verily which is part of their alphabet conglomerate they invested in Google Glass so they have worked on so much which makes this question even harder and lastly let's look at their business model Google's business model is so that they make about 80 of their revenue off of ads whether that's YouTube ads or Google's Network ads or directly on Google search platform and then the rest of the rad Avenue

might be coming from licensing products for example they started charging Enterprises to use Google workspace Gmail Etc they're also selling a lot of consumer products like the Google home but the chunk of their revenue is still coming from and as we know the advertising space is a bit shaky given a lot of the regulations that we're seeing on user privacy data so now that we understand Google's business let's talk about goals and this piece is so key to be able to make progress on this question because this question of what should Google build in the

next five years is really ambiguous and you can go in so many different directions that is almost overwhelming so you have to narrow it down a bit by asking yourself for what purpose in the next five years is a number one to diversify its revenues we talked about Google's revenues is 80 from ads does it need to do a better job of diversifying beyond that and to sell other things so that if the ads climate comes under more regulation or tight constraint they are not being threatened or two is the goal something to fight off

competition as we've seen recently with the development of chat GPT by openai or other contenders such as people spending so much time on Tick Tock does Google need to fight back in some way to protect its territory I mean you have seen Google fight back on these initiatives with things like Bard which they developed which is supposed to rival chat GPT I don't think it's there yet and also YouTube shorts which is a post-rival tick tock videos or as a goal to drive user growth so are they trying to acquire new users get engagement from

existing users so that could be another goal and we talked about we saw that Google invested billions of dollars into next billion users which is to bring their services to those emerging markets that might not have access to Internet or is their goal to continue innovating Google is really well known to just push the boundary on Spaces like self-driving cars or Google Glass the Internet space with these balloons and they have so much under their portfolio of Google X and A lot of times they are innovating for innovation's sake it's not clear in the long

term whether they're going to be able to make money but they know it's really important to push the boundaries because who knows what the next trend is and they feel confident that whatever they come up with such as when they started off with search they would find a way to monetize so to tackle this question you really need to understand well what is the goal and here you might ask the interviewer directly whether they have any input or a lot of the times they're going to put it on you to prioritize what do you think

the goal should be and as always when you make decisions start off with the criteria and here my criteria is which has the highest urgency or which has the highest impact on long-term Revenue growth so if I start to think about these list of four things well today's climate in Tech is a bit weird as they're talking about in 2023 Tech has constricted a bit where we've seen even companies like Google had to lay off tens of thousands of their employees last year in December they had to Nix their next billion users organization and really

cut down on costs which means they might de-prioritize Innovation for innovation's sake in the meanwhile and hence that's going to help me eliminate number four and they've had to prioritize things that have more obvious return on investment Google has also seemed to de-prioritize acquiring a lot of new users as I mentioned they Nix their next bill in users organization which means I'm going to de-prioritize number three as well so that leaves me with number one and number two diversify revenue and or compete so I think most important for Google in this climate is the diversify

Revenue to make sure that they survive and as you might say the competitors are taking a piece of Google's lunch and they need to go fight them but you saw that competition does not necessarily mean a significant threat to Google survivorship for example Google was competing against Facebook as Facebook was becoming the main dominant social media player and Google had developed a bunch of products to try to rival Facebook and it did not succeed so they had tried Google plus there was other products in other countries that did better than Google Plus but despite it

not defeating Facebook it was able to coexist and still make a ton of money from ads Revenue so I I might then say yes competition is important to push them forward but beating out these competitors in their own game might not be the most critical to survivorship so I'm going to prioritize diversifying revenues and keep an eye out for how to also maybe beat their competitors while doing that now the next step we've now hunkered down on a goal which is the diversify Revenue we need to know who we're going to be building for in

order to determine what we're going to be building so let's get clear on what are some users that we could focus on and from Google I would say the four key users they could be building for again these are very general but the first is Enterprises and these are large organizations large companies that even though they make up a very small number of total businesses they make up a chunk of the revenues or GDP of the country so Google itself would be an example of one of these Enterprises second would be small medium businesses who

make up the majority something like 90 of the number of businesses and this is the case in the US third another type of user they target is the solo entrepreneurs so think about with YouTube they're tackling these creators who start off as solo entrepreneurs often or maybe they are working with someone else in the video and fourth they could be focusing on everyday consumers selling things like Google Nest Google home and whatever other products that we are using as consumers so the criteria I'm going to use here is to look at two things the potential

Revenue growth from this group versus the effort and this is me basically looking at the return on investment so if I think about these four groups and look at the current climate we are kind of in a recession where there's High inflation and hence we might expect consumers to be spending Less on digital Goods so I might de-prioritize consumers when I think about large Enterprises yes they generate a ton of Revenue and have a ton to spend but it's also very costly to acquire them the sales Cycles are pretty long and on top of that

to build for them is costlier because the quality or the expectations they have is going to be at a much higher regard so now I'm left with the small medium businesses or the solo entrepreneurs and if I look at which group is going to bring a higher amount of potential Revenue in the long term it's going to be the small medium businesses over the creators because when I think about the sole entrepreneurs they have a lower ceiling as to how much they could be making versus a larger size business now that we've identified which users

we want to be tackling for we then want to understand what challenges of theirs that we can build for so a top tip here is I want you to think about challenges that are big and lofty versus small pain points and that's why I call this section challenges and not pain points like someone of the product design Frameworks that you've seen me use and that's important because the end solution should be something that's pretty ambitious and not like a feature so if you narrowed the space and make it a pain point it becomes too narrow

to develop something that becomes a product Suite again they are asking what should Google build in the next five years it should be something quite needy so if I look to see what are the challenges of small medium businesses I have two main categories the first is more on operations and the second is more on growth so under operations some of the big challenges they have one starts with hiring and this includes finding the right people training them and retaining their employees I think about my own experience with my parents who started their small medium

business when I was in high school and their main constraint was finding people to work for them which meant because it was hard to find people they had to spend all of their time working a second effort of these businesses are to digitize their business as we see technology optimize processes and serve as key things of communication with customers businesses have been pressured to adopt these technologies that might not be very easy for businesses to do so a third thing is tracking business performance so a lot of times businesses don't even understand the number of

customers they have the number of sales they're making and it's all sort of a mess and hence if they don't have the full picture how are they going to be able to optimize it and number four on a similar vein their financial management is a key challenge oftentimes they don't know how much capital is flowing in and how much capital is Flowing out what are the Investments that they're making and sometimes they businesses find themselves in trouble without even realizing it for example I remember one of the most famous restaurants when I was in Copenhagen

I will put a link of the name so apparently even though they are the most famous and again top rated Michelin star restaurant with a wait list that's basically impossible to get off of because all of the reservations are booked so despite its popularity it apparently went out of business and partially maybe something to do with the cash flow now we'll talk about the grow part of small medium businesses challenges and the first even starts with capital A lot of times for these small businesses they might not be able to get access to loans from

Banks so how would they grow then that is talking about marketing and customer acquisition so a lot of times for these small businesses they don't know how to Market what to be marketing they don't even know who their customers are or who should be their Target customers they have quite of a challenge there and let's say they do find the right customers sales growth is a challenge for them how do they get their existing customers to buy more to spend more and the last big challenge for small medium businesses is competition so it's so hard

for small medium businesses to compete with these larger companies already so think about how much corner bodegas and supermarkets and Corner shops had to close down with the entrance of something like Walmart so we have these eight big challenges these Mega challenges that small medium businesses are struggling with now to move forward to solutioning we have to figure out which ones are we going to prioritize and our criteria is which of them we think businesses are most willing to spend on and which of them do we think aligns with Google strength so if I look

at these eight things there are a couple that I would de-prioritize because if a business is doing well these might not be the most important things for example business digitization and incorporating Technologies might not be so important if there's a ton of demand or things even like tracking business performance or financial management if a company is doing really well securing capital and funds to grow might not be as important so what are the most critical crucial ones that I think businesses will spend on it's one hiring at the basis of any company will need employees

to make it successful and this is something business time time again have expressed frustration in being able to hire the right people higher in time and the other two that I think align with Google strengths are the market and customer acquisition component of course Google has already done a fantastic job with this ads platform and helping small meeting businesses show up when people are searching for things and the other thing that Google could grow into is helping these businesses with sales growth how does it help these customers build relationship with customers to continue growing then

continue understanding what these customers needs are so because Google hasn't already built its ads platform I'm also going to de-prioritize marketing customer acquisition because Google is already working and succeeding and excelling in this space so that leaves me with hiring and sales growth and here as I begin to think about the challenges that I'm prioritizing for Google to build in the next five years my vision is for Google to make it easier to start and scale businesses so now let's talk about some solutions and my Pro tip here is you want to think in line

up a product Suite versus features again they're asking you what could Google build in the next five years you need to think of something bulky and here I also don't want you to over rotate on the most Innovative things so if a common mistake people make is throw in trends like oh we should build something for chat gbt and not give a specific use case on what it could be useful in solving the users challenges so let's talk about a couple solutions that Google could work on for the next five years so on the hiring

angle there's a couple of Dimensions to look at it the first is challenging the basis that you even need to hire so maybe what Google can invest in is building robotics that would assist companies in tasks that would make it easier so the companies don't have to hire as much as needed some great examples we're seeing if you've recently been to Uniqlo in New York City they have these self-checkout machines that are pretty amazing there's no scanning you literally just put the items in a bag in that section and they detect what you bought and

there's one person coming around to manage all the six stations of self checkout machines so that is kind of Hardware you wouldn't necessarily call that a robot but just imagine a future where Google is building these small robots to take on tasks for example for restaurants you might build robots that can actually do the cooking I mean a lot of cooking is following a recipe which is pretty algorithmic so think about maybe giving a robot certain ingredients and giving them a list of what to execute on and the dish should come out pretty consistent each

and every every time and maybe even better than if a chef made it don't let Gordon Ramsay know that I just said that other examples of where robotics could help is you think about in clothing shops a lot of work is going in to do things like folding clothes in the back room or in grocery shops a lot of Labor is going into stocking shelves so could we take some of those tasks and have robots Aid people in them so that employers would have to hire less of course I know this topic is very controversial

but I'll leave it there as an idea because I think it is pretty powerful a second thing I think Google could go into is to build a product Suite where they use generative AI to assist business employees with accomplishing tasks like marketing for example when businesses write marketing material they have to have a person come in to write the copy so imagine a world where you take an existing employee any employee who doesn't have expertise in anything but being armed with this generative AI let's say to do marketing they now don't need to be an

expert but instead could you leverage that expertise and execute off of it to do more General things so for example they can use genitive AI to find the copy they need to write for marketing and they can do the things that need less expertise like putting that copy on certain types of print or a banner or copying pasting that copy into an ads platform so this way it helps small meeting businesses not need to hire for different types of expertise but have people who are really good at learning being able to be assisted with expertise

to then leave them the easier things to do a great example I've seen in the space is my friend who definitely is not technical she has not needed to learn how to code to build something and instead she's been assisted by chat GPT to help her come up with code to execute and build this widget and she basically copy and pasted that code into python to run things well what could be something for sales growth well one thing for businesses to continue increasing sales from existing customers is to build a relationship with customers but nowadays

I see so many of these businesses building kind of generic relationships with customers where they're sending generic emails to their customers that's not really building a relationship I see a vision of a world where each customer almost has a relationship with the business like they would with a friend so what could that look like you can imagine Google may be investing in things like business messaging so it already has the Google Maps platform where there's a directory of basically all the businesses in the world so how does it use that to then maybe create a

communication Channel between the businesses and customers to develop a long-term relationship so that customers can stay loyal and could feed back into the loop to help businesses understand what products they should be building so this is only one type of product strategy question that companies are asking here's another exam sample of a product strategy question being asked that large companies like Google for example should Amazon enter the smartphone market so check out this video and I will see you guys in the next video