The Most Common Mistakes in the Google PM Analytical Interview
This post will take you through a sample response and common mistakes to an analytical interview question I used for years as a PM interviewer at Google (I left Google in April of 2022 for a role at Shopify). Candidates typically spent all 45 minutes on this question and were evaluated on multiple analytical skills.
This post assumes familiarity with:
- Commonly used tech metrics*
- Fermi estimations
*Knowledge of both is not always expected for Associate Product Manager (APM) interviews, but I still recommend spending a little time familiarizing yourself with the basics of each.
The question
You are responsible for launching the offline downloads feature for the Netflix mobile app. What does it mean for this feature to be successful? What metric do you care about most to measure success and why?
If we had time, I also asked:
What magnitude of change should Netflix be targeting with this feature? (ex: +1%, 10X, etc.) Success here can be anything from “help more users accomplish a task” to “grow revenue,” etc. Explain your reasoning.
Why this question
I asked about Netflix because it’s a widely used service that most people know. The goal of an interview should never be to trip someone up by asking about an app they don’t know! Also, if someone had just been asked a question about offline downloads or Netflix by another interviewer, I could replace Netflix with another app and “offline downloads” with another feature. The important thing was picking on a feature that adds value but probably wouldn’t make or break the business. For evaluation purposes, we don’t want the answer to be too obvious, like “success = more revenue.”
This article was written by Julia Winn for Medium. Read the full article here.
