Suppose you're trying to convince Google execs to keep growing the YouTube Shorts product. You can put 3 graphs in your slide deck. What graphs would you want to create?
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I have a couple of follow-up questions to get a better context of this meeting.
- How well our exec know about Youtube Shorts and the underlying business? - Assume that they know the business.
- Can I overlay couple of related metrics in one chart?
- When you say keep growing the YouTube Shorts product, can I assume that we need to get continued investment in terms of engineering, product as well as sales, marketing etc? - Yes
Thanks. This context helps.
Let me start with first sharing my understanding of YouTube Shorts as a product. YouTube shorts provides vertical videos in a short 60s so that creators have a way to engage with their audience outside of Tiktok. Today, YouTube Shorts doesn't show any Ads and plans to show Ads starting in 2023.
did I get this correctly? Did I miss anything? - No
here is my structure to influence my stakeholders:
I will highlight how YouTube shorts directly contributes to the YouTube Mission. Then, I will highlight the key metrics that brings out the current and future potential of this product to our company.
- first, I might quickly flash an anecdote with a user quote about how Youtube Video gave them a voice to express their opinion and build their community. this will help us anchor around how YouTube Shorts is directly contributing to our mission.
- next, googlers deeply care about the data. So, I will collect my charts that are deeply grounded in data so that i can back up all my claims.
- Here, are the 3 chars I will include in my presentation.
- Market Growth and our Penetration Rate over the last 12 months
- Highlight Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) and how fast this space has been growing in the last 12-24 months.
- overlay SAM with our MoM growth for the last 12 months to highlight our acquisition and activation metrics and our market penetration rate in this space (no. of unique users / day)
- User Engagement Metrics
- i will also looking at the user engagement with Youtube Shorts. (aka user session time/ day).
- I will also look to explore if this increased engagement has resulted in increased engagement with other Google properties such as YouTube, more searches etc. example: no. of user spending time across Youtube short and Youtube?
- User Churn Metrics
- I will highlight our churn rate - that is
- (total activated users per month - activated users who has not watched more than 1 shorts per month) / total activated users per month
- I will highlight our churn rate - that is
- Market Growth and our Penetration Rate over the last 12 months
three metrics that will highlight are
- overall market growth - especially SAM and how fast this space has been growing
- our growth rate and overall our market penetration to highlight our acquisition and activation metrics (no. of unique users / day)
- highlight Shorts specific engagement metrics (user session time / day
- My hypothesis that this has resulted in additional engagement with other Google properties. If yes, then I will overlay this session in the engagement chart as well.
trade-offs: I could have also called out hypothetical revenue potential - based on the engagement metrics (YouTube shorts aims to show ads starting in 2023). But, I will not do this at this time as we might delay our Ads plans etc. So, I will focus on growth potential, engagement and churn metrics.
Note: This seems like a north star metric question. The question is asking (1) how the NSM is doing and supporting the broader company mission and goals, (2) supporting metrics for the NSM, with gaps and investment opportunities, (3) a prioritization of these opportunities showing how different levels of investment impacts the NSM/company outcome
By doing this, the execs can have a view of whether they agree with the prioritization, consider their investment level, and where the current gaps are for the product.
Now, let's examine what's the product, how it fits with the broader company mission, who are the users/stakeholders, what are the desirable and undesirable actions along the user journey. Then, we can come up with the metrics and pick a north star metric that represents product value delivered.
1. YTS is a competitive response to TikTok who shows that this format has a large market and the audience and creators are interested in this. Tiktok is also showing that they could monetize this very well in China through ecommerce. But, they are yet to show profitability in the US. As YT who is trying to gain watch time from competitors, they could be losing watch time to Tiktok over this particular format, as well as creators. This is all for YT to lose. Engagement time migration/cannibalization from YT, Total SFV watch time in the market, #creators on SFV, #creators overlapping with YT creators would all be competitive metrics to watch out for.
2. Google's mission is to structure the world's information and make it useful and accessible universally. YTS would satisfy this mission by allowing creators to make short videos that shows what is the most interesting short content to consumers. If not for this format, it might be hard to tell which part of a long-formed content is really interesting.
Users: Creators, Consumers, Advertisers, Youtube/Google
NSM: Time spend on YTS
Supporting metrics:
Consumer: DAU, #daily sessions on avg; avg time per session, #users spending more time on YTS than YT, churn metrics (7-day retention)
Creators: #short creators, #only shorts creators, #videos created, #videos watched for X timees, retention metrcs
Advertisers: #ads impression served in shorts, #ads viewed in shorts, CTR of ads viewed
Chart 1: Time spent on YTS, YT, Competition over past 12 months - will show the market potential based on YTS/TT's growth in time spent and how it performs relative to YT and TV/Streaming service in terms of velocity and opportunities
Chart 2: Show various strategic options - NSM and Supporting metrics impact with the largest improvement opportunities - e.g. growth features to add to DAU, increase supply, simplify production of shorts, raise quality of content, improving relevance for users, AI to detect interests etc.
Chart 3: Show level of investments according to the prioritization and impact to NSM and supporting metric levers. [Or this can be condensed into Chart 2 above]
Then, new chart 3 would be: consequences of not investing, or investing less than X. What would be the projected impact to YT overall.
By doing this, the execs can have a view of whether they agree with the prioritization, consider their investment level, and where the current gaps are for the product.
Now, let's examine what's the product, how it fits with the broader company mission, who are the users/stakeholders, what are the desirable and undesirable actions along the user journey. Then, we can come up with the metrics and pick a north star metric that represents product value delivered.
1. YTS is a competitive response to TikTok who shows that this format has a large market and the audience and creators are interested in this. Tiktok is also showing that they could monetize this very well in China through ecommerce. But, they are yet to show profitability in the US. As YT who is trying to gain watch time from competitors, they could be losing watch time to Tiktok over this particular format, as well as creators. This is all for YT to lose. Engagement time migration/cannibalization from YT, Total SFV watch time in the market, #creators on SFV, #creators overlapping with YT creators would all be competitive metrics to watch out for.
2. Google's mission is to structure the world's information and make it useful and accessible universally. YTS would satisfy this mission by allowing creators to make short videos that shows what is the most interesting short content to consumers. If not for this format, it might be hard to tell which part of a long-formed content is really interesting.
Users: Creators, Consumers, Advertisers, Youtube/Google
NSM: Time spend on YTS
Supporting metrics:
Consumer: DAU, #daily sessions on avg; avg time per session, #users spending more time on YTS than YT, churn metrics (7-day retention)
Creators: #short creators, #only shorts creators, #videos created, #videos watched for X timees, retention metrcs
Advertisers: #ads impression served in shorts, #ads viewed in shorts, CTR of ads viewed
Chart 1: Time spent on YTS, YT, Competition over past 12 months - will show the market potential based on YTS/TT's growth in time spent and how it performs relative to YT and TV/Streaming service in terms of velocity and opportunities
Chart 2: Show various strategic options - NSM and Supporting metrics impact with the largest improvement opportunities - e.g. growth features to add to DAU, increase supply, simplify production of shorts, raise quality of content, improving relevance for users, AI to detect interests etc.
Chart 3: Show level of investments according to the prioritization and impact to NSM and supporting metric levers. [Or this can be condensed into Chart 2 above]
Then, new chart 3 would be: consequences of not investing, or investing less than X. What would be the projected impact to YT overall.
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