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You're the PM for Google Cloud storage. How would you measure success?

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Clarification:

We are talking only about cloud storage and not any of the following which doesn’t come under the classification of cloud storage. Specifically not the following

Google drive

Firebase

Compute storage

Filestore

Product Description:

Use-cases are for storing objects in cloud for many of the following not restricted to

Standard - Hosting static websites, storing data which is accessed frequently from your compute engines

Nearline - Highly durable but access(RW) is less frequent (once a month )

Coldline - Less than once a month. Like once a quarter- highly durable

Archive -  Once a year. Highest durable, SLA

Cloud storage by itself (remember that we are not talking about Google drive etc.) serves primarily two of the multiple use cases

  • Can be used solely as a standalone storage mechanism without an active project/application
  • As a part of a cloud application

 

The difference between both are

  • If using as a part of cloud application, the customer is tying their application to Google's cloud eco system and will use other services offered
  • Will  use more storage as application increases the demand for storage and also the demand on network transfer and storage also increases
  • If solely used for storage, it will be periodic transfer of data from on-premise data to cloud storage. Mostly a hybrid cloud model

 

Another point to consider is that all cloud storage offerings offer a free tier and only after you cross the storage limit you will start to get charged.

Competitive Analysis

 

Currently the market leader in cloud storage and computing is AWS with Google Cloud a distant 3rd and Microsoft taking the second spot

 

In terms of competitor's strength

  • AWS - First to the market, massive lead, plethora of storage options by granularity (IOPS, throughput) for different use cases
  • Microsoft - Hybrid cloud strategy, works best for all office applications used across the world
  • Google Cloud - Specialized applications in terms of ML/AI engines, data sets that can be used for training models etc.

 

Market Analysis

  • Multi cloud deployments are still not easy and generally one vendor solutions reduces complexity
  • Hybrid cloud deployments are the form for normal applications

 

User/Organization analysis

  • Startups - # of Employees < 10, going to launch the product and get the demand hopefully
  • Small & Mid sized companies
  • Large companies 

 

Product Lifecycle

  • Even though Google cloud storage was launched first amongst the Google cloud products, its adoption is heavily dependent on the applications moving to Cloud platform
  • Even though it’s an old product, based on my understanding of the market and competition I would like to focus on acquiring new customers

 

Google Cloud's Mission and Goals

  • Mission is to help organizations around the world to help in digital transformation by providing the best possible infrastructure

 

Metrics for measuring success

  • I am going to focus on the acquisition and engagement/adoption of the cloud storage as the ultimate goal. Not going into the segments/verticals acquisition/adoption

S No.

Criteria

Funnel

Metric Explanation

Implementation Difficulty and Notes

Impact

Priority

1

Users

Acquisition

# of New users signing up for the free trial

Easy - Helps in measuring the conversion later and also what can be done better

High

P1

2

 

Acquisition

# of New users entering their credit card details

Easy - Shows that the user is serious about using the service

High

P1

3

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of New users actively logging on daily/weekly

Easy - If the application requires maintenance it will show a high number. Can be misleading as well because of dependency on application

Medium

 P2

4

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of New users creating project(applications) & buckets associated with the applications

Easy

High

P1

5

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of New users using other GCP services, compute engine etc.

Easy - Good metric to track in the long run

Medium

P3

6

 

Adoption/Engagement

The traction/visibility of the new user's application i.e. Number of website requests, sessions etc. - this directly ties to revenue metrics as network traffic increases

Easy - The billing is done automatically

Medium

P4

7

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of new users transitioning from free tier to paid tier

Easy

High

P1

8

 

Adoption/Engagement

Rate of storage use increase by user

Easy - Helps in promotions,  targeting users

Medium

P4

9

Storage

Adoption/Engagement

#  of new users turning on lifecycle management, tier management notifications etc.

Easy - Shows adoption and also in future they plan to use storage more extensively

Medium

P3

10

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of new users using archival solutions for their cloud data or on-premise data

Medium - Long term adoption

Medium

P4

11

 

Adoption/Engagement

# of new users requesting access to archival data

Easy

Easy

P4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are a bunch of other services that can also be used to measure success like number of IAM roles/users etc. but focusing only on storage here.

The reason I have marked most of the implementation notes as easy - GCP already has dashboard to show all these data and easy to get.

 

I would like to focus on  (1), (2), (4), (7), (3) for measuring success in Phase (1) and after a period of 6 months focus on (5), (6), (9), (11) along with the previous list.

 

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Things you did well

  • Well structured: Great initial overview of how you plan to answer the question and great structure throughout the answer 
  • Product Description: You did a great job explaining what the product does and how it works today
  • Evaluation of metrics: Your evaluation and prioritization of the metrics are reasonable and easy to understand. 
  • Summary: you provided a good summary of your answer  

Areas of Improvement

  • Goal: I think the goal would be more strategic here. For example, given the stickiness and huge long term potential of cloud services, should a goal around gaining market share be mentioned? I think so. 
  • % more than numbers: I'd like to see you mention some of your metrics (e.g. # of users who convert from free to paid) in the form of % rather than #. For example, if 1,000 people convert each month, is that good or bad? It really depends on the total # of users who signed up for the free trial 
  • Retention: I would also add a metric that helps you measure retention better. Your average # of posts per user might be going up because more users are trying it for the first time but non are reusing it. A couple metrics around retention is important. 
  • Market share metrics: I think it's very important to know how well Google Cloud is doing overall. For example, what % of cloud service sign ups in the world belong to Google? Should should be to estimate that. 
  • Revenue metrics : This is also missing. We need to know if these sign ups are all from small companies or include large ones. 
Overall, I think you need to think more from a CEO perspective and think about the high level business metrics that tell you if Google Cloud is doing well or not. 
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