Prepare a Product Review

Clarifying Questions & Goal-Setting

Candidate (C): Thank you for the question. I’d be happy to choose a Google product - before I start, do you have any preferences on picking a hardware vs software product?

Interviewer (I): No preferences.

C: Assuming I can pick amongst home-grown and acquired products, there are quite a few products of Google that I love, like Search, YouTube, Android, or Photos, to name a few. For the sake of this discussion, I’d be happy to delve more into YouTube.

I: Sounds good, please go ahead.

C: Great. I’d also like to gather some more context on what kind of a review it is - is this to cover product health / current state of YouTube, discuss product roadmap, or something more specific - for eg. health of any particular product line within YouTube?

I: Overall product review, not for any particular product line.

C: Ok. Can I consider this as a global review and present aggregated metrics, or should I deep-dive into any specific geography or demographics?

I: Aggregated metrics are fine.

C: Lastly, are there any specific goals for the review?

I: I don’t have much to share at the moment, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts / assumptions.

C: Perfect, I should be able to get started with that and clarify any further questions down the line.

Choosing a Product and Defining Focus Areas

C: To set some context upfront, I love YouTube for delivering on its mission of being a community-centric content platform that gives everyone a voice. With its 2.5B+ user base, it has been one of Google’s most successful acquisitions and has become a strategic core product for the company. In order to think about product metrics, I will need to take into account that YouTube is, broadly speaking, a two-sided marketplace catering to -

• Content Consumers
• Content Creators

Technically, advertisers are also users of YouTube, tied to the overall ecosystem. However, given time and the scope of this discussion, I’d want to look at product metrics as it relates to the two main user groups of content consumers and creators, if that makes sense to you. I: It does. How do you think the metrics converge and diverge for these two user groups?

C: I can elaborate on that by looking at metrics across the product lifecycle / marketing funnel for these user groups. Here’s my initial take on it:

I know I’ve listed down a bunch of metrics - I intend to prioritize and pick out key success metrics in alignment with you, but I want to pause here to see if you have any questions?

I: Yes, this is a fairly exhaustive list. Do you think the review should focus on any particular part of the funnel or metric type here?

C: Hmm, YouTube is a pretty mature product that has a significant user base, so I don’t think the executives would be as concerned about awareness or in turn acquisition at this point. That said, I know a big shift in the world of content eight now is the pivot towards byte-sized short form content. The launch of YT Shorts is also likely in response to reduced attention span of consumers (especially GenZ) and potential churn to competitive platforms like TikTok, or Instagram Reels. Given that, I’d think retention is a big focus.

In addition, I also feel engagement fundamentally has a flywheel effect that improves retention and hence monetization. So I think spending more time on engagement & retention, as compared to the rest of the categories (which we can cover in exec dashboards or in the presentation appendix, unless any related metrics have dipped considerably) would be fair.

I: That’s a good point and I agree that would be a priority for the leadership.

Selecting North Star Metric(s)

C: Great. Now that we are aligned on the focus areas for the exec review, I’d want to pick a north star metric (NSM). To me, the success of YouTube is defined by the time one spends there, and that in turn encourages creators to add more content to the platform. So in the review, I’d definitely talk about:

• Consumer NSM - Avg. watch time / active user
• Creator NSM - Avg. number of uploads / creator

I’d ideally want to see a growth in NSMs, as long as we can qualify that with quality-related guardrails. In terms of other tracking metrics, I’d want to keep a close tab on churn & retention that are lagging metrics, and make sure to highlight any big changes to leadership.

I: Makes sense. What would you want to cover on the monetization front?

C: Right, while we are looking to grow the product’s user base, YouTube eventually makes money through ads. This is also super critical to support the creator community since that’s how they are compensated, and unfortunately, the cost of content production has also shot up a lot lately.

I’d work with my Google Ads team counterparts to source & validate the advertising related metrics. Other than that, I am sure executives will also be curious about some newer launches that we are doing in the monetization space - eg. super chats, channel memberships, support for creator NFTs, etc. So I’ll definitely cover highlights & progress on such launch plans.

Storyboarding the Presentation

I: I think we’ve covered good ground so far. Let’s say, we only have ~30 minutes and 5 slides to talk to the exec team. What exactly would be your game plan for the actual presentation?

C: That’s interesting. If I have to make my own assumptions, I’d say this is a review to present product health, highlight important new launches and get their support to make further progress. So here’s how I’d structure my presentation -

• Slide 1: Product Vision (how we’ve evolved in our approach and current thinking)
• Slide 2: Product Health (highlights & lowlights, causes, key business + competitive trends & implications on product performance)
• Slide 3: Product Roadmap (timeline of major launches with status (red, yellow, green), focus on big wins and what’s at risk)
• Slide 4: Impact (how do we see the product roadmap scaling (projections are also fine), why should the execs care) Slide 5: Asks (what do we need from leadership - time, resources, budget)

The idea would be to convince the leadership about what we are doing (through slides 1-4) and get a buy-in on our plan so as to fund / support the asks. How does that sound to you?

I: I like the approach and I think it’s quite holistic. No further questions on my side.