How would you increase growth and market share for Google Cloud?

Question

How would you increase growth and market share for Google Cloud?

Asked at Google over a year ago

1.6k views

Asked at

1.6k views

How to answer Product Strategy questions

Interview Guide

Clarifying questions --

Candidate : Before I proceed. Cloud It is providing on demand IT resources over the internet with pay as you use structure. Is that a right understanding?

Interviewer -- Thats right

Candidate : Users

Primary Users - Primarily caters to Businesses
Secondary users -- Individuals with data storage requests

Is there a specific user segment in scope for this request

Interviewer -- You choose

Business Objective -- To clarify, is the objective to increase market share or revenue by specific percentage?

Interviewer -- Both

Candidate-- Currently GCP is third by market share in the world, what is the growth we are tagetting?

Interviewer -- Google's current market share is 10% and the target is to reach min 25% in one year

Candidate : To paraphrase -- We want to increase GCP's market shared by 150% in one year

Interviewer -- Thats right

Candidate : Last question for this bit --

I am assuming that we are open to short term cost impact to achieve the business objective

Interviewer -- Thats a fair assumption

Candidate : Thank you, I will take a moment to jot down my thoughts

SolutionBusiness Objective -- We want to increase GCP's global market share by 150% in one year.

Primary target segment -- Business

Reason -- Business comprises to be the primary customer segment for cloud computing and there is a lot of scope of penetration in this market.

Since we are trying to improve growth our product I will try to look at Product- Market matrix to identify the opportunities. This matrix will help me with

Identify GCP's current offering
Conduct competition analysis
Identify various opportnity spaces for GCP

New Product

Rollout missing features such as backup services
Increase the availaibility zone to each market where Google is operational

Work with DeFi, Crypto to create distributed computing cloud
Offer out of the box blockchain solution

Existing Product

Promotion

Offer discounts
Implement freemium model
Offer bundled solutions
Identify sectors which are yet to adopt Cloud computing e.g. Banking and provide Secure/Dedicated storage solutions
Work with regulators to prove the privacy use-case

Offer out of the box CRM solutions for small and medium enterprises
Key small business segments could be restaurant, stores with expansion plan
Google maps data could help identify the right candidates
Collaboration with IT, SaaS and Telecom service providers

Existing Market

New Market

Prioritize above solutions

Since we have a very aggressive target -- We need to pick multiple solutions in all the 4 quadrants. I will use Impac to market share as my primary criteria to prioritze the solutions with High Business impact

Features/Solutions

Impact to BO

Existing Product - Existing Market

Offer discounts / Offer bundled solutions / Implement freemium model

GCP is already priced competitively in the market and reducing price or offering further promotion may not have significant Business impact

Identify sectors which are yet to adopt Cloud computing e.g. Banking and provide Secure/Dedicated storage solutions

· Work with regulators to prove the privacy use-case

This step will have significant impact in the market and may help in opening up a revenue stream from a new segment

High Business impact

Existing Product - New Market

Offer out of the box CRM solutions for small and medium enterprises

· Key small business segments could be restaurant, stores with expansion plan

· Google maps data could help identify the right candidates

· Collaboration with IT, SaaS and Telecom service providers

Kubernetees is a technical orchestration solution which helps in cloud adoption but requires a lot of technical expertise. Providing simplified cloud solutions will help in adoption by new market.

High Business impact

New Product - Existing Market

· Rollout missing features such as backup services

A missing feature that is available by competitor may have an impact on customer acquisition.

High Business impact

Increase the availability zone to each market where Google is operational

This step will require a pre-requisite of market analysis, however increasing availability worldwide will provide significant edge in the cloud space

High Business impact

New Product – New Market

Work with DeFi, Crypto to create distributed computing cloud

Being an early adopter in this space could provide significant edge

High Business impact

Offer out of the box blockchain solution

Blockchain solutions are already provided by multiple incumbents but a simplified blockchain solution provided by google will help in diversifying customer segment for google

High Business impact

Nimasha Jain · Answer 2 · 2024-03-04T08:09:09+0000

Google – mission of organizing information

Growth – comes with revenue, new customers, cost cutting, new features in existing products

GCP - It is providing on demand IT resources over the internet with pay as you use structure.

Current competitor analysis

	GCP(Third)	AWS(leader)	AZURE(second)
S	Strong data analytics Extensive global n/w	Largest share as of now Brand loyality	Established presence for enterprise market Wide range of services and tools
W	Lose enterprise tieups	Pricing complexity Rely on 3rd part tools	Open source support missing Too tech savy
O	Growing demand for AI and machine learning solutions in the market. Increased partnerships and collaborations to enhance its ecosystem.	New industry Sustainable expansion	IOT & 5G networks
T	intense competition ; Potential challenges related to data privacy and security, especially in light of regulatory changes.

Few strategic initiatives I can think for GCP

Initiative	Impact and its kind	tradeoff
Partnership with 3rd part especially with opensource collaborator	positive ; new customer onboarding	Compatibility issues and quality checks
Make enterprise presence with google suite	Positive ; new user onboarding	May need strong marketing and partner marketing
AI availability	Already doing ; market expeansion	Already costing bomb
Increase price of some products in standalone mode	Negative ; revenue	Increase in revenue Vs may lose small customers/startups
Decrease freemium model	Positive ; revenue	Increase in revenue Vs may lose small customers/startups
Enhance simplicity in terms of products and subscription	Positive ; product	Its directly working on competitors’ weakness.
Venturing into new markets/geographies	Neutral ; expansion	Capital intense

Summery

GCP can work to stretch its market share with more enterprise onboardings, simplified pricing model and high availability.