Welcome to the AWIP Coursera course, Bob! I'm so excited to have you here for the mock interview. Today we're going to interview you as if you're going for a product management position at Google. Great. Thank you. Well, and so just for context for our watchers, here is a Google interview. Typically Google PM interview, unless it's for a very specialized roles, is a very general interview. How it happens is we typically go through and interview candidates for a generic pool and we call them a pool of candidates. From that pool, then we match these candidates with teams depending on their preferences as well as depending on teams headcount availability. In that sense, and we'll cover this in a separate session, is very similar to the MBA hiring process that you might see at Amazon. Great. Bob, are you ready? Absolutely. Let's get this started. During a Google PM interview, I want to know about your product preference as well. Because after all, you are going for a Product Manager position. Can you name your top five favorite mobile apps and tell me why you like them? Name five mobile apps, I would say I actually really like Netflix. Netflix is one of my favorite ones only just because I like the personalization, I have the ability to have different experiences and it does a good job at tracking what my preferences are. I think beyond that interestingly enough, I like a couple of measurement apps, like there's an app MyRadar that I really like because I think it's interesting because it has a lot of layers to it. I can look at a lot of different things in terms of the radar patterns and looking at rain patterns. I really like some depths that that app has. As I think about it, I'm trying to think what would be another favorite one. So let me take a look here and see if I can draw a quick one. One of my other favorite apps, my third most favorite app is one called Night Sky. Night Sky is actually for those who are interested in star patterns and how they line up. It's really interesting because it's interactive with whatever position you have, so if you hold the the app it uses the geolocation in order to orient you to where the star patterns are in the sky so you can follow it. Very similar to what you might see in Facebook in terms of some of the photo of what there. The fourth app that I like, believe it or not, is Airbnb. The Airbnb app is really interesting because it gives me the ability to not only tag the things I'm interested in and do the filtering I want, but it allows me to really customize that view and be able move that view around. I can zoom in, I can draw out, I can look at a bunch of different things. I like the interactive nature of the app so that is an equivalent of use my fingertip mouse over it. I can expand out and see an interesting little poster that comes out. I like that because it allows me to make some really quick decisions without having to really drill deep on the application. What would be my other one. The fifth application that I really like, another one that's interesting for me because I happen to like to do woodworking projects is the Home Depot app. One of the things that I like at Home Depot app, and I've actually mentioned this to some of my product management colleagues, is I'd like the fact that I can look at the entire inventory of Home Depot at different stores and even though it locates me in a certain store, I can reorient to a different store to see not only its inventory, but I can also decide, well, which direction I want to go in a particular store. So I don't get locked into, well, here's your zip code, and so therefore, you're locked into this store and you can't change it. I have a lot of flexibility in that and I also like the fact that when I go to look something up, then it will look up the inventory in other stores. So it will give me a requisition that says this particular item isn't available at this store but it's available at this other store, which really makes the decision-making quite easy for me. I don't have to do a lot of drilling. I really like that. That's awesome. If you thought about all of the five apps that were your favorite, and we heard some examples around entertainment, some examples around productivity, some examples around hobbies, which one should Google acquire? Interesting. I think the one that I would recommend Google acquire is I would probably go for Airbnb. I say that because the Airbnb of the five that I described, Airbnb is probably the one that I would recommend Google buy. All five had the similar attributes of personalization, which is something that I have a lot of passion around. I think that Airbnb probably more closely aligns to Google as a business because they tend to look at search results. They tend to look at behavioral modeling based on some of the choices you make. Something like Airbnb as you're making choices, is a system can learn from your choices and make better recommendations. It's probably more closely aligned to the business of Google would have than any of the five. Awesome. Thank you Bob. My thoughts on your answer, live feedback is on the first part around your top five favorite apps. Without giving the secret sauce away, in my experience, interviewing PMs for Google is that Google typically looks for a very structured answer. How might I suggest to recommend an answer is, hey, my five different apps fall in three categories; entertainment include Netflix, for hobbies, I have a weather measurement app, as well as an app around woodworking and lastly, for travel such as Airbnb. Now, if I were to rank them, for example, top 1,2, 3, 4, 5, and then you would go maybe into detail on the top two or top three and then ask the interviewer for more detail or if they would like you to provide more details. All right. But I thought your explanation around the second part of what should they acquire was actually pretty solid given that you explained your understanding of the Google business strategy and then also explain how in that case you chose Airbnb, how it might fit into how Google conducts strategy and also monetizes all the decision-making, so that was pretty solid.
