Product Strategy questions can be categorised into 3 main buckets:

  • Define a company strategy
  • Expand to new markets (new products, new use cases of existing products, expanding into new customer segments with an existing use case)
  • Building a business on top of a new technology

How to solve?

  • Come up with a genuine answer as if you were in the leadership of this company
  • Read about the strategies of different businesses by reading recent keynotes from the leadership and develop your own perspective on these strategies
  • Always consider tradeoffs

Broad framework:

  • Clarifying questions to scope the problem effectively, state assumptions clearly and confirm
    • clarify keywords form the question
    • timeframe / resource constraints
  • Competition: What are their products? What features are different from ours? Where they might be better than us in solving customer problems? Where they might be weak.
  • Broader market: consumer trends, macro environment, forces impact supply-chain etc. Apply Porter 5 forces (suppliers, buyers, new entrants, substitutes)
  • Our own business
    • Product / Placement (distribution channels)/ Pricing
    • Strengths, weakness
    • Current strategy
    • Products on the roadmap
  • Tradeoffs

Define a 10-year strategy for Uber?

Mission: Set an ambitious vision: Move things (not just people)

Customer tenets

  • Fast and convenient
  • Safe
  • Economic conscious

Porter 5 forces:

  1. Competition
    • Obvious: Lyft
    • Non-obvious competition: (self-driving) Cruise, Google etc. What are the strategic moats for these companies?
  2. Customers
    1. Network effects: more customers the platform has means the focus should be on a mass consumer offering
    2. Internationalise: go into local markets to compete which has 2 usecases
      1. Transporting things from point A to point B (point B could be an international location which would make the value prop stronger)
      2. People travelling to international locations
  3. Suppliers
    1. Gig economy: Drivers are not controlled by Uber.
    2. Start owning the supply chain. How do you either build your own fleet or invest in autonomous driving?
  4. Substitutes
    1. Other modes of transportation (public taxis - low)
    2. Moving things (UPS, Amazon, DHL)is a commodity business - affordable price
  5. New entrants
    1. Hyperloop
    2. Decentralised transportation networks similar to DeFi

Go To Market Launch

How would you launch a product meant for Uber drivers to find a restroom?

Broad framework to answer such questions:

  • Clarify
  • Mission / Business case / Goal: Mission of Uber and how this product ties to the company’s mission? What is the business case for it? What could be the goal of this product?
  • Ecosystem / User segments / Geolocation
  • Product
  • Placement (Online store, Partners - resale, ISV) based on where to acquire customers from
  • Promotion (trials, POC, deals)
  • Pricing
  • Risk / Regulations
  • Success metrics
  • Summary

4Ps for Google

  1. Products
    1. Software
      1. OS
      2. Mobile apps
      3. Desktop apps
      4. Web apps
    2. Hardware
    3. Services
  2. Placement / Distribution
    1. Online: The company uses its websites, apps, and platforms as distribution mechanisms to reach target users/customers.
    2. Offline: For goods like Pixel smartphones, Google uses vendors or retailers as the main outlets.
  3. Promotion
    1. Sales promotions: discounts and free product usage. For example, the company allows free use of Gmail. Coupons are also given to potential advertisers to try using Google Ads for free within certain limits.
    2. Advertising: Different media types like newspapers, google news.
    3. Public relations: financial and technical support for communities. This support promotes the technology business by creating a positive brand image.
    4. Sponsorship: sponsorship for various events, such as social outreach programs.
    5. Direct marketing: Google’s online advertising of its own products is a direct approach to reach customers. For instance, the company advertises its Google Ads service via Gmail, such that the advertisements are shown to users who have a history of searching for digital advertising solutions. Thus, the business directly promotes its products to individual customers based on personal usage data, such as device location and search history. In this case, the granularity and specificity of showing personalized or semi-personalized ads to online users can be considered as a form of direct marketing.
  4. Pricing and Pricing strategies
    1. Freemium pricing: Gmail free for consumers but paid for business
    2. Market-oriented pricing: Pixel and cromecast
    3. Penetration pricing: Google cloud platform
    4. Value-based pricing: Ads

Sample Questions:

Google Product Strategy Interview

  • How would you monetize Facebook Messenger?
  • Imagine you’re a PM at a startup that works with big data from the NHL — what’s the first product you would ship?
  • How would you sell live plants at Amazon?
  • If you were the CEO of Facebook, what are the top three things you would do?
  • How would you bootstrap a product that helps people find apartments?
  • Imagine you’re the CEO of Apple — what product would you eliminate from the lineup?
  • If you were a VC, would you be more bullish on AR or VR?
  • Why do you think Microsoft bought LinkedIn?
  • Facebook is expanding into travel to compete with AirBnB — should they build a standalone app or integrate new travel features in the core Facebook experience?
  • If you were the CEO of LEGO, what new product line would you come up with to increase revenue?

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