Interview Questions

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

Kartikeya N. - "C : Okay. So I would want to start with knowing what is the product for which we have to build a recommendation system. I : This is a photo sharing product. C : Okay. So is this something on the lines of Instagram? I : Yes C : Okay. And are we a new product co or we have some current product built already? I : You can assume yourself. C : Okay. Is there any demography or country we are targeting? I : No, this is a global product C : Okay. So, the biggest goal of any product recommendation system"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

Nikitha G. - "Clarify: What is a transaction in Instagram Shops? Users click on an item and complete the payment in the Instagram Shops interface How many transactions happen in Instagram shop per day/month? What percentage of users have completed at least 1 transaction on Instagram Shops in the last year? Key Metric to improve: # Users completing a transaction Goals of the Product / Feature: Meta’s goal is to build community and connect people together Instagram’s goal is to connect and"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

Alice S. - "Clarify understanding of the problem space. What does success look like? How is it measured? Platform specific? Market specific? Time period? Business goals? Then perform a funnel analysis to understand user journey and look for problems or opportunities. Choose a user segment to focus on. Identify different user segments and prioritise one. Summarise the goal of the user and the friction point. Brainstorm solutions. Come up with a number of rough solutions. Balance the business n"See full answer

Kell K. - "This by far has been the best interview I've seen so far, granted I've watched 15 mock interviews. Great Job!"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

Shashank K. - "Situation: Our company was going through tech stack updated and our team tasked to migrate existing code into Typescript(TS) and all future development to be written with TS within our codebase. TASK: Migrate existing codebase to TS and future integration to be TS compatible. ACTION: The team deep dived into picking up TS skill and learnt some basics and focused on delivering the migration in phases. I prioritised the files to migrate based on levels of complexity. I created a Fil"See full answer

Jacky Y. - "Problem scope: Can this system detect Bot in real-time online or offline? Both. Online traffic: 1M DAU. Latency: 2s. Offline frequency: daily Offline data: 2B activity logs. Data: How do we know a Bot player (Label)? Human label. Imbalance data: reweight, resample. Develop a Bot simulator to generate more data offline for training. Given lower weight to simulator data than human label. Features: Signals from different models online. Log all the features for offline. Propose new features: dail"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

Anonymous Ferret - "i do feel like the question itself is kind of confusing. Youtube does have a product called YouTube’s Analytics, which is a channel analytics tool for creator lol"See full answer

Anjali V. - "I feel this is more about "Describe a time when I failed or struggled" rather than "Project Failure"."See full answer

A B. - "Great explanation on each of the components and their use. During the interview would a PM candidate be expected to go in-depth for capacity estimation (e.g. storage estimation, bandwidth estimation etc.?)"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

Nagendra S. - "Assumptions: Platform: iOS/Android and Web Application Service Type: Renting Bicycles (hourly, daily, weekly), possibility of buying or selling Geography: Focusing on Asian markets, e.g., India, where bicycles are a popular mode of transportation Role: Product Manager at Microsoft Objective: Design an app focusing on customer engagement and new customer acquisition Setting the Stage: Why a Renting Business? Market Potential: In Asian markets, a si"See full answer

Anonymous Sparrow - "Clarifying question to make sure that I'm analyzing the right feature - is this the notification bell that is in the Facebook app and site? (assume Yes) Tapping on it opens a drop-down that captures items and activities that the user should be aware of? (Yes) Ok, I believe I'm clear on which feature you're referring to. My approach: Customer problem and value proposition Meta's mission and north star metric Customer journey and notification bell use case Success metrics on value del"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

Balaji G. - "This is the answer I have prepared. Please let me know your comments and how I can improve the answer. I have worked on many process improvement initiatives and projects. I want to share an initiative that I led and delivered while at my previous employer. It had a great impact on over 60 programs and projects across teams in six different countries. Analysts and program managers used to generate a monthly program performance report that deals with all aspects, including schedule, risks, costs"See full answer