Shadowing Practice: Google product manager behavioral interview (Top 5 questions) - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hi there everyone, welcome to this  Google product manager mock interview.

My name is Mark and I used to be a senior  product manager at Google for quite a few years today i'll be playing the role of interviewer and  my candidate is Akshat. Hey everyone i'm Akshat I also used to be a product manager at Google where  I worked on Google stadia and messages. Awesome thanks Akshat so for this Google mock interview,  i'll be asking Akshat five very common behavioral questions, Akshat ready to get started? Let's do  it .okay first question: tell me about yourself Great question if I were to describe myself I  would say i'm a builder at heart i've always been drawn towards building and tinkering  with things um you know some examples I can think about are in middle and high school spending  sort of all my time uh in under our robotics shed messing around with woodworking equipment and uh  you know putting together little robots um I once made this small little gadget that lets me listen  to music in the shower you know a sleeve that I can slip my iphone into and a little sound box  that it'll play music from um to like little games that i've built for myself like a td a 3d tetris  game and for me that sort of builder culture is sort of ever present at Google and that's what  makes me really excited to to work there and just be in an environment where that's celebrated.  Yeah that's cool I can I can resonate with that I know a lot of my colleagues love to build things  uh even when they're not in the office so I really liked Akshat's answer here and the reason is is  that he focused on not his academic credentials he didn't focus on his professional credentials  but instead he went something to his childhood so he talked about being a builder he talked about  being a tinkerer he talked about building robotics and then he actually brought in specifics  so things like the ability to build little games and things like this so you can imagine as a  child these things would thread through his career and kind of made the dna of Akshat but he didn't  have to set himself apart with his academic or professional credentials so I really like this  answer. Okay so why do you want to work at Google?

i think there's a couple of  things that are unique to Google that um are really attractive for me as I  think about my the next step in my career the first thing is really um about how Google  builds for for a global audience um there's very few companies where the work that you're  doing really impacts everyone all over the world and I think that presents unique challenges  for a product manager as you think about who your customer is who your user is I think product  managers at Google really have to build for people with all sorts of different circumstances  and constraints whether that's differing levels of internet connectivity you know different kinds of  languages and scripts left to right right to left you know different kinds of world views and  assumptions and I think that is a unique challenge that one grows a lot from working  on the second thing is building for scale I think at Google scale you know there's really  no such thing as an edge case and that really impacts how you think about product development  how you think about launching new products and just the the thought of a new feature you  launched touching so many different people is both really exciting but also daunting and I  think a great learning experience and then finally I think Google is a company that works on really  hard problems and I think in some ways Google has the luxury of working on really hard problems  where other companies you know they don't for Google nothing is too expensive and I think um  the opportunity to work on really unique problems like self-driving cars or quantum computing or ai  breakthroughs is really unique very cool thanks so I really like this answer from Akshat and  because he really talked about Google and not about himself which is really the key to this  question so specifically Akshat bought up three points one which was about building for global  which is super important for Google because it's a global company second which is building for  scale which is also a really hard problem I mean billions of users is a tough problem and the third  thing is actually solving really hard problems which is a major problem that Google has at the  scale it has for the global features it's trying to launch so this is a bit of a trick question  it really asks why you want to work at Google but think about how you can help  solve Google's big problems.

Okay next tell me about a time you  demonstrated product leadership.

hmm great question so on one of my previous teams I was working on  a messaging product and that messaging product was having extreme reliability issues that's to  say you know messages just weren't sending which is a pretty important feature of a messaging  product they would either get lost or go to the wrong place and the issue was that the core  engine that was powering communication was buggy it had been brought in through an acquisition and  that code hadn't really been properly integrated so the team that was responsible for this engine  had been hard at work trying to fix bugs but they really always felt like they were playing a game  of whack-a-mole and after you know several months of working on the problem we hadn't really seen a  market improvement this was really frustrating for leadership as well who was you know blocking  a number of important public launches until the messaging problem was fixed so what  I did is I decided to sort of jump in and spend 50 percent of my time working on these core  reliability issues in addition to new feature work it wasn't a glamorous job but it was one that was  important to the team and after speaking with the engineering teams responsible for the messaging  infrastructure and sort of really pulling back the curtain on the problem it became clear  that they actually knew the solution all along the solution was just to rewrite the entire  engine which had been brought in as the result of an acquisition of another product but because  they had been feeling t feeling pressure from leadership to sort of deliver on an aggressive  timeline this ex this option hadn't been exercised so one thing that I did is I helped create a plan  around completely rewriting this messaging engine I socialized that plan with leadership and  ultimately got it approved and set up a plan for how we would deliver it you know a quarter and  a half later we started to see market improvements in messaging reliability and what I learned from  all of this is oftentimes the solution is known it's really about setting up the setting the team  up for success and making sure that the entire team is bought in on a plan of action very cool  I liked Akshat's answer here for three reasons one is he made the problem really simple he  didn't make it complicated it wasn't uh you didn't have to understand another product it was  just really basic second he used words like this was not a glamorous product this is great because  it shows that you have grit as a product manager and sometimes unsexy things are very valuable and  the third thing was his solution was very bold doing a rewrite is a pain in the neck no one loves  doing it but often it's the right thing to do especially in light of a failure so again it's  a good answer simplicity grit uh tough decision went to executive management and got the  problem solved this is a good example of product leadership okay next question tell  me about a time you solved a team conflict So when I was at my previous company we had  launched this experimental product called skypass and skypass was like a digital vaccination  passport so this was during covid and it suddenly became important for people to be able to prove  their test result or their coveted status in order to travel so for about four or five months we had  launched skypass uh and started dedicating you know engineering marketing resources to trying to  get it off the ground and it was not showing signs of traction unfortunately it continued to be a big  drain on resources you know case in point there were features that I was trying to build that  had to be de-prioritized um in favor of sky pass the issue was that sky pass was sort of led  by one key executive who was really personally invested in the product but others across  the team started to feel that this was no longer a good use of resources this eventually  led to sort of conflict and finger-pointing and you know people getting defensive  and their egos getting bruised it was clear that we needed to come up with  some sort of plan to move forward on skypass in a way that sort of involved the entire team  what I did is I came up with a set of criteria for running a proper experiment with this with  with skypass I decided that we would come up with a set of criteria that after one quarter if  skypass hadn't hit we would just we would wind the project down the hard part was getting everyone  bought in on this criteria I worked really closely with the executives who had sponsored the project  in the first place as well as the engineering teams who felt that this project was a drain on  time to come up with a set of experiment criteria and key kpis that skypass would have to hit in  a quarter you know a quarter and a half later skype has not hit those criteria and we did  have to sunset the project but now we had some objective data to back up our decision as  well as the buy-in of the entire team and so what I learned out of this is in times of conflict  it's really easy to fall back to finger pointing and say you know make assumptions about the  merits of an idea or how well it was executed on but it's really important to get everyone on  the same page and sort of remind everyone that they're on the same team it's also important  to have objective sources of truth to navigate decision making during these kind of emotionally  complex times so that's what we did for skypass and I think it worked well. Okay nice  so this was a strong answer by Akshat the the basic fundamentals of this problem is you  want to set up a problem um and show a solution and describe what you learned so in this case  he set up a common objective he described some criteria that they needed to meet then he executed  on that and evaluated on it and these are the core elements of this type of question. Alright last  question: what makes a good product manager?

i think from a behavioral standpoint you know a  product manager needs to understand his or her market the user and more importantly the company  and the context in which they're operating right a product manager is only as good as the team that  they can sort of set up for success and enable and in order to get buy-in from your cross-functional  peers in order to make them successful you need to deeply understand you know what their goals  are right and like what their constraints are.

it's really important to empathize not  just with your user but also with the peers that you're working with and make sure that  everyone is rowing in the same direction and hand in hand with that you know high eq  is really important strong communication conflict resolution skills I mean even in the  two anecdotes that we just went through I think conflict resolution is so important because you  know a demotivated team no matter how smart they are won't really get much done and oftentimes it  falls to the pm to make sure that morale is high and that people are working well together. So I  loved this answer from Akshat because it really gets to the heart of being a good product manager  at Google specifically focusing on the user the market that company context from which you're  operating in right he used words like empathize he used words like having in high eq he used words  like communication these are all kind of the critical skill sets of being a good product  manager at Google. Okay Akshat that's the end of the interview congratulations you did an  awesome job and I hope that was fun for you too.

Definitely! I hope this interview  has been helpful to everyone watching both Akshat and I are coaches on IGotAnOffer  so if you have an interview coming up and you need help preparing feel free to reach out and  you can find us there. Thanks and good luck!