Google Interview Questions

Karthik M. - "1. Step 1: clarify Let's establish the mission of Google and Youtube. Google's is to provide and make information more accessible. Youtube's might be to help people get their content, their word and themselves out into the world. I mean so many of Youtube's ads have been about how the diversity of individuals and their content, so that makes sense. Let's establish what is Youtube. Youtube has 3 primary stakeholders - creators, viewers and brands/corporations and within them"See full answer

Sumeet R. - "Clarifying Questions: Assume US Audience or Worldwide? US Only Assume short form content or long form content ? Assume all Premium or Ads Support ? All Solution: US Population 300M Will remove 70 ages as not relevant audience or not have access to YouTube = 60m Leaving 240M. Adoption of YouTube with remaining Population = 60% (including overlap and exclusion with other services e.g. Netflix) Total Audience that watches YouTube daily = 144m (about half of US Populat"See full answer

Mehul K. - "Clarifying Questions Are we building feature for YouTube Music/YouTube Video? -> YT Video has higher scope of user engagement so YT Video. YT Video has 2 forms of video content, are we focusing on long form, short form or am I free to chose ? -> YT Shorts and short videos have taken off lately so focus on it. Do we have a specific business goal with regards to building this feature ? -> We want to improve engagement. Do we want to build this feature for a specific kind of audience or"See full answer

Issac K. - "I learned that people and teams build great products, not processes and job descriptions. The quality of the teamwork will directly reflect in the quality of the product. My biggest failure as a product manager was failing to build a foundation of teamwork before starting a project with a new cross-functional team. As the PM of a new product, I like to get my engineers involved early and often in the design process, but tight schedules with an even tighter resources made the tension and st"See full answer

Ankita K. - "Clarifying questions: What is user frustration/ Define user frustration? Was this qualitative feedback, or some reviews on playstore or support that we saw recently or some drop in metrics or increase in churn, or overall churn that we are addressing? Let's assume frustration leads to users quitting the app and hence an increase in churn. This churn also indicates that users leaving the app after trying out a particular feature and not doing the core action of seeing the route from point A to p"See full answer

anush - "@Jacob, your videos are really good and helpful. I want to know about the tool, you use for explaining the design in the videos."See full answer

Jazmia H. - "Weak point: suggested something that YouTube Music already does- offering the service free to Premium members. Rebounded by saying the lack of user awareness is a pain point and how it can be mitigated- by frequent check-ins by way of notifications and emails Strong point: discussed overall strategies of global expansion, marketing and innovation with pros and cons for each approach. Settled on discussing an innovation piece combining ranked recommendation of YouTube music as well as personaliz"See full answer

Manas M. - "Couple of Clarification Questions to be asked are: Aim of the physical product Retention/Encourage Loyalty Attract new customers Collect customer Data outside of the Airbnb ecosystem for better advertising and customer focus User Base of Airbnb Solotravellers - traveling to new places for exploring/solo travel Business Travelers - Lot of business Travelers who own small/medium businesses and book their own travel can choose airbnb Family gr"See full answer

Patrick B. - "Clarify what the business goals of Spotify is Depending on the stage, some companies care more about revenue growth, some about user growth and in rarer cases, about profit margins. In the case of Spotify, the company is still in growth stage so I will make some assumptions that user growth is the most important, followed by monetization. Plus, margin is relatively fixed due to the contracts with recording labels Recently, Spotify has invested heavily in podcast with goa"See full answer

Urvashi G. - "YT threats →. Let's define threat - activities that reduce actual or growth rate for user base / watch time / $ User - what impacts user base, users’ watch time (why would users not use YT anymore?) Competition - all apps that compete for users' time spent on digital entertainment (VOD, social media apps like tiktok, vMVPDs) Safety, trust, privacy, digital well being No relevant content Distribution - platform bans, distribution deals falling through (eg smart TVs)"See full answer

Babaa - "Function signature for reference: def calculate(servers: List[int], k: int) -> int: ... To resolve this, you can use binary search considering left=0 and right=max(servers) * k so Example: servers=[1,4,5] First server handle 1 request in let's say 1 second, second 4 seconds and last 5 seconds. k=10 So I want to know the minimal time to process 10 requests Get the mid for timeline mid = (left+right)//2 -> mid is 25 Check how many we could process 25//1 = 25 25//4=6 25//5=5 so 25 + 6 +"See full answer

Aditya S. - "From Product Management perspective: I would first start with some clarifying questions. Is this algorithm to be used across Play Store for all kinds of apps or for some specific catgeory of apps What is the major objective. Are you entering a new market and hence objective is to capture market OR already in an existing market and want to maximise profit (since Google, most likely second objective) I would like to experiment with algorithms and see results before finalising. This will nee"See full answer

Gokul S. - "A gas station is a place to refuel our cars to a set amount, pay for it, and get out. What do we mean by great - do we want to revamp the experience of a gas station? Yes. Who are we? Let's say we are one of the big oil dealerships in the US. OK, so we are looking at building this in the US? Yes. Is this for a specific type of gas station - for trucks, normal cars, or other special vehicles? Assume it's for normal cars. We are a big oil dealership and we want to revamp our gas stations."See full answer

Rjj - "I tried solving this problem and here is the recorded video for the answer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1tOkeQjyI4 And here is the link to Excalidraw board - https://excalidraw.com/#json=uabNFHcZm5qNh8CInMvyh,Wn9Vf1ZhGdl_iBCQYFkYdw"See full answer

P K. - "Clarification questions: What does an increase in usage mean? Microsoft wants to grow its market share in the browser segment Why do you want to increase the usage? Increase in IE usage would increase Bing advertising revenue Are you targeting any specific platforms to increase usage in? You tell me Are there any geo's of specific interest? worldwide Would it be fair to assume that the increase in usage is represented with an increase in the metrics - "Increase in no. of requ"See full answer

Karan K. - "2 Approaches: 1) The more intuitive approach is doing a multi-source BFS from all cats and storing the distance of closest cats. Then do a dfs/bfs from rat to bread. Time Complexity: O(mn + 4^L) where L is path length, worst case L could be mn Space Complexity: O(m*n) 2) The first approach should be fine for interviews. But if they ask to optimize it further, you can use Binary Search. Problems like "Finding max of min distance" or "Finding min of max" could be usually solved by BS. "See full answer

Anonymous Raven - "How often do we get 15 min to answer a question? Wondering isn't the expectation to answer this in 3-5 min?"See full answer

Brandy L. - "Restaurant Types High-end Fast-food Regular User Types Restaurants – seeking operational efficiency and increased revenue. Customers – categorized by group size and dining intent: 2–4 Friends/Family – casual dining. Solo Diners – convenience and quick service. Groups > 4 – shared orders and split bills. Goal Design a tablet solution to achieve product-market fit by addressing key pain points and driving high ad"See full answer

Saket S. - "I will divide my answer in 2 parts: Process I use for managing risks in any Project I will explain a real life situation where a Risk occurred and how I managed it Process for Risk Management can be broken down into 3 parts: Risk Identification: Risk identification is a team effort and is an ongoing process that happens throughout the Project. Technical Risks are usually identified during design/build/testing stage. I maintain a Risk register document to capture all the risks identified"See full answer