How to Answer Growth Strategy Questions

Growth strategy questions assess your ability to find the right levers to pull to maximize growth. Example questions include:

• “How would you increase the number YouTube users?”
• “How would you 10X Google Cloud IoT usage?”
• “How would you increase Gmail ads revenue by 20%?”

There are many paths to growth. Depending on the question you might decide to focus on attracting new users, driving engagement with existing users, or even reducing churn. Your choice will be highly context-dependent. The key may lie in untapped user behavior, alterations to the product or the business model, or a strategic partnership.

Growth questions can be answered using the standard strategy framework with a slightly different lens. You’ll spend more time making sense of where the product/company is now and diving deeper into key factors like user behavior to figure out how to drive growth.

Step 1: Define the landscape

Begin by clarifying the problem and gathering enough context to allow you to model the goal as a simple equation.

For example, say you were asked to reduce churn by 10%. Churn rate = (lost customers / Total customers at the beginning of the period) x 100.

From this equation, you know that you need to either decrease the number of lost customers or keep the number of lost customers steady while increasing total customers - or both. Check-in with your interviewer and confirm that your model reflects the situation at hand. If there is any ambiguity in the question, ask your interviewer.

Ask any questions that will help you understand the product, company, and landscape considerations impacting the status quo and how they might play into growth goals. Be sure you understand:

• The key value drivers of the product or business
• Any existing strategies; understand why they were chosen, what metrics are being tracked, and how those metrics have changed over time
• Any specific strengths and weaknesses in the product or business

Step 2: Identify options for growth

Next, you’ll define an overall strategy that makes sense for increasing growth given your goal and the context you outlined. From there, you’ll brainstorm options, choose one, justify, and evaluate your answer.

Here are some common growth strategies to be aware of:

• Market Penetration: Growth opportunities abound in existing markets. To penetrate deeper into a current market, companies typically work to increase market share by attracting new users or altering their pricing strategy. This can also involve increasing marketing efforts, enhancing product features, or considering mergers and acquisitions within the same market to consolidate and expand their presence.
• Market Expansion: Instead of focusing on the existing market, companies will often work to expand their reach by entering new markets with their existing products. This could involve geographic expansion, targeting new customer segments, or finding new uses for an existing product.
• Product Development: Instead of looking for new users for an existing product, companies can expand their product offerings to continue selling in the same market.
• Diversification: With a diversification strategy, a company might try to enter a new market with a new product. Diversification is generally considered the riskiest growth strategy.

As you work on your overall strategy, consider where the company is in the marketplace, what its overall business strategy is, and what the company's mission and culture are. A small startup might get away with a bolder move than a large entrenched player, for example. You don’t want to give an answer that’s out of touch with the ethos of the company.

As you identify opportunities, don’t be afraid to dig deep into user behavior. Generally, growing a company means reaching more users or getting “better” usage. Consider the user subsets who aren’t using your product - are there large groups that have characteristics or even pain points in common? The larger the subset, the easier it will be to achieve significant growth if you reach them, though you should always be cautious when making assumptions about large groups. Ask your interviewer more clarifying questions if there are specific insights you’re looking for.

Finally, prioritize the next steps of your plan to increase growth and summarize and evaluate your answer. To prioritize, be sure to refer back to the product and company strengths you identified and your understanding of the market. Consider:

• Likelihood of success
• Expected impact
• Any short (and especially) long-term strategic benefits

Once you’ve made your choice, recap your process and evaluate your answer. You might:

• Transition into product thinking to come up with a feature or a new product that fills a gap identified
• Briefly explore an alternate idea that you didn’t go in-depth on, say, a strategic partnership or acquisition that might offer synergies
• Offer risk mitigation strategies for any risks that came up
• Discuss the details of executing your plan, including any metrics you’d track, and counter metrics you’d want to keep an eye on

Let’s work through an example to illustrate.

Growth example: How would you increase YouTube’s average watch time by 2x in the next 3 years?

First, clarify any ambiguity in the question.

“Do we mean the watch time for all YouTube products or for the core YouTube product?

Let’s assume your interviewer confirms that you’re increasing watch time for the core product only. Now, create a high-level equation to capture your goal:

“I think of average watch time as number of users x (average watch time / user). To drive average watch time up, we’d need to increase either the number of users, or the average watch time per user (while holding the other constant, at least). The best case, of course, is that we raise both. Does that capture the situation?”

Assume your interviewer gives the go-ahead. The goal is relatively straightforward, but you should still aim to arrive at a better understanding of YouTube’s strategy, its place in the competitive landscape, and its current approach. For example:

“YouTube represents the largest video platform in the marketplace. It’s dominant in many (but not all) of the markets they’re in. It has billions of users and the watch time is likely in the hundreds of billions of hours per year. YouTube does really well with educational content, longer video logs (vlogs), and is basically the default for embedding video on the web.”

“YouTube does have some notable competitors across different types of video content, from TikTok (at the short end) to Netflix (at the premium end). YouTube has tried to compete with both to some extent, with Shorts and Originals, as short-form video is a notably fast-growing space.”

Next, it’s time to generate opportunities for growth. Given the context defined and your model, what opportunities are available? Recalling your high-level equation where you identified that to grow YouTube, you’d need to increase the number of users or watch time (or both):

“To acquire new users, we’d need to grant access to users who currently can’t use YouTube or acquire users who don’t use YouTube by choice. Given the scale of YouTube, the second group is probably small and fragmented. To increase watch time, we could consider why people watch YouTube and what keeps them from watching more. I’d guess that a few of the key reasons are:

• Limited time to spend watching video
• Data limitations
• Preference for other kinds of content (e.g. short-form video)

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll proceed with the goal of increasing watch time rather than acquiring new users.”

You may find more specific and actionable angles to the problem if you decide to dig deeper into specific use cases. Niches won’t get you to 2x growth, but there may be important use cases worth considering. Some options to explore might include influencer content or potential upside in educational content. For example:

“Influencer content is a huge use case, and one problem affecting YouTube is that many influencers favor other platforms, reducing the time viewers spend on YouTube. Likewise, educational content is already a big vertical, but many people don’t consider YouTube their first choice for learning, so there’s likely still more upside for growth.”

There are many options to consider. Use your judgment, but remember, getting more specific about user behaviors, types of content, and how the market interferes with watch time could all yield valuable insights. Given the challenges above, assume you’ve narrowed your brainstorm down to the following ideas to expand watch time:

“My top ideas are:

• Expand in international markets
• Claim a larger share of short videos
• Get back into premium video
• Expand in a new or underserved use case, like education or influencer content”

With the shortlist above, it’s time to prioritize a strategy, building on YouTube’s strengths and your understanding of the market. Remember to consider factors like the likelihood of success, expected impact, and any longer-term strategic benefits. For example:

“In this case, I believe expanding our footprint in short-form video could be a good strategy. Though we haven’t had great success yet and there’s tough competition for viewers and creators, it’s an important and large space. We have significant strengths as a brand and platform, especially because many TikTok creators do also maintain a YouTube presence. Succeeding here also helps us expand in verticals like education, so this helps us continue to grow.”

In this example, you noted that YouTube had failed to seriously compete in short-form video in the past. If you want to recommend that strategy going forward, you’d want to call out why YouTube hasn’t found success and account for that in your strategy. For example:

“Notably, we’ve tried, but we haven’t succeeded yet in this space. To move forward, we’d need a more concrete plan to show that success is feasible. Leaning into the strengths of YouTube, it doesn’t make sense to just copy competitors like TikTok or Reels. We should use our position to our advantage, that is, our existing content, brand, relationships with creators, connection to Google, and more.

From here, you could go a number of ways.

• You could dive into a bit of product thinking here to come up with a valuable product.
• You could think about partnerships or programs to drive more creators to YouTube.
• You could think about acquisition targets to give YouTube a boost in audience or product functionality.

Let’s assume for the sake of the example that you suggest building an app for Shorts — leveraging YouTube’s strengths in a form factor commonly used with short video. As you close your answer, you’d consider risks, challenges, and tradeoffs:

“The largest risk, as we acknowledged before, is that YouTube faces strong competition here and we haven’t yet succeeded in the space. This comes with a risk of wasting resources and attention but continuing not to make gains. I suggested building an app for Shorts. One important tradeoff here is that while an app may make it may be easier to acquire some users, it will be more difficult to bring them into the larger YouTube ecosystem. This might not be important though; it’s a factor worth digging into more deeply given more time.”