1.Design home automation system.

2.Recommend 5 YouTube videos to a user. How will you

measure success/failure of your suggestions?
A: I will check the no of likes and dislikes and check the comments
whether they are positive or negative then see the YouTube top
videos.
3.What are the first steps I as a Product Manager will look
into when designing an app for a theme park?
A: Gather Business Requirements - Functionality, User Profile,
Brief Features, Timelines. Broad wireframes with the design team,
budget. Identify the minimal compliant version and the timelines
for it.
4.What features would I include?
A: Should cover the entire lifecycle of the experience. Right from:
Planning - Buying Tickets - Reaching There - Booking Rides Paying for other ancillary services. The agenda is for the user to
have fun at the theme park. The mobile app should take care of
every other logistic.
5.What metrics would I track to measure the success of
app?
A: No. of Installs | TIckets Booked from App | Tickets collected at
the kiosk using the app | Other Merchandise Bought through the
app | Booking the feeder/transport service through the app |
Checking for Offers, Features and special events through the app |
No of Uninstalls | No of referrals | Ratings on the play store/app
store
6.How would I design an ATM machine for use at a
country's airports?
A: What is the user profile: International Travelers, Domestic

Travelers. Features: Forex Rendering, Multi-Lingual, Currency

Denominations, Forex Surrendering.

7. Design a mobile social app for a chain of

local orthodontist offices?
8. What are the number of new book titles published in
the U.S. each year?
A: "Proper" way to do it- Look at the publishing data for the
top 10 publishers in the US and their market share. Total
number of books published = #published by top 10/ %
market share.
But you don't have access to that data in an interview :)
So - Armchair analysisBack into the number using US population as a starting
point:
- Population ~320m
- 50% read books (adults) or have books read to them (kids)
= ~160m
- Assume- each person reads 5-10 new books in a year
- Book consumption = 800m to 1.6bn books/ yr
- Assume 50% of that traffic is re-circulated bookshalfpricebooks, libraries etc
- Final estimate= 400m to 800m books published
- Best sellers sell millions of copies, others not so much (long
tail)
- Assume- #copies per book, on average is 2m
- SO FINALLY- #Titles is 200m to 400m
WHOA! Thats way too much. What might have gone wrong?
Perhaps initial assumption of 50% readership is too high
(Might use real data to calibrate offline). Perhaps 5-10 books
is too high?

Actual answer does not matter as much as the analysis. This

is all speculation anyway. If interviewer is insistent on
a"reasonable" number, I would apply a different approach
like below to rationalize (Details left as an exercise to the
reader :) )
Back into the number using # book stores estimate as a
starting point:
- Estimate book store in a neighbourhood, then make
assumptions on how it will scale nationally
- Estimate # titles in the store assuming floor space, multiply
the two

9. How would you know if website traffic has been

reduced after adding a feature? what would you do?
I would be careful to answer it without investigating the core
issue. What was the purpose of the feature (what were the goals),
in what regard the traffic was reduced (regional, global, what
about existing users, who did they react) what does traffic mean
here? for e.g. if the new feature is SMS notification instead of an
email, then perhaps the user is satisfied or has no way to get to
the site from SMS. It maybe good or bad based on the objectives.
If it is actually meeting the objectives of the feature but has a side
effect as a whole, then it is a different solution altogether. Get the
problem domain nailed before solution.
1) Scope the problem -> What is traffic? New users, unique
users, MAU, retention? Can we tell how much?
2) Even before you roll out something -? Do A/B testing to
ensure this is statistically significant
3) Make sure there are no seasonal effects or external
elements such as network issues
4) Make sure there are no other substitutes that just became
available in the market at the same time
5) If you can statistically conclude that there's indeed a

correlation, take corrective action

6) Corrective action can be to roll back the feature or make
modifications with A/B testing

10. If you were Product Manager of (unnamed product),

how would you improve the functionality 10x of what it is
now.
Collect information. what is currently wrong with it? what do the
users/customers hate about it? what do they love about it? what
is the competition offering? what is the competition planning to
offer? what do the users say is missing (if only it did this, I would
the happiest person alive)?
Next, get the weights. I now have a list of features that can make
it better, which one would weigh more to make the customer feel
that it's 10x better? plan accordingly, and implement.
11. If you host a celebrity website which displays ads and
suddenly notice a drop in traffic to your site/clicks on ads,
how do you root cause the issue?
1. is the trend all across the site and for all ads?
if yes, factors would be content, look & feel of the site,
ease of navigation, introduction of new features on the
site
if no, then every page has to be looked into individually
on the above mentioned factors. also compare with
those pages which still get more clicks(usually the
landing page)
2. is the fan base constant?
customization of the site to let the users decide what
kind of ads they would like to see
3. Key factors to consider - Fans' profiles, celebrity's
profile, profession, products advertized, and macro

issues. Drill down on each level to extract potential

issues relating to the drop.

12.How would you estimate the number of seniors in India

who use gmail?
population of india: 1.2 bil
approx seniors in india: 100 mil
internet reach in india: 10%
this leaves about 10 mil seniors with internet access.
gmail reach in india: close to 70%
would give the answer as 7 million gmail users
Defining seniors as people above 55yrs
1.2 bn people in India.
India has one of the highest proportion of working age
population. So I assume about 30% of the above population
to be above 55 = 360mn.
The rural-urban ratio is about 60-40, which leaves about
200mn rural and 160mn urban.
Safe to assume that there are practically zero seniors from
rural areas on gmail due to lack of education, internet
penetration, power etc.
That leaves about 160mn in urban areas. Breaking this up
into tier1 and tier 2,3,4, tier1 cities would have 40% of the
seniors and 60% in tier 2,3,4, ie, 60mn in tier 1 and 100 mn
in tier 2,3,4
The internet penetration should be about 40% in tier 1 cities
and 10% in tier 2,3,4 cities. This leads to about 24mn seniors
with internet access in tier 1 cities and about 10 mn in tier
2,3,4 cities. Assuming an adoption rate of 20% in tier-1 and
10% in tier 2,3,4, it leads to about 4.8mn in tier-1 and 1mn in
tier 2,3,4. So in all about 6mn gmail accounts by people over
55 in India

13.
What happens from the point when you type in a
URL in your browser to the point the page gets
displayed?
1.DNS or /etc/hosts file is referenced to check if the
address can be resolved into an IP address
(depending upon the /etc/redsolv.conf settings).
Similar check is performed on non-NIX OSs.
2. If the IP address is found either via DNS lookup or
through hosts file, the ARP table is referenced to find
the MAC address of the machine.
3. Once the MAC address is found, the browser
queries GET for the URL from the website on the
requested port (if no port is specified in the URL, the
GET is issued by default onto port 80).
4. Local NIC card is used to sent out the packets on
the destination MAC address.
5. Browser downloads the URL page and renders it
into HTML and displays it.

14. you were appointed the product manager, what would

be your top 3 priorities?
1. launch a new product to increase user base
2. take google home page towards a more customizable
portal and not only a search page
3. increase usage of peripheral google apps and increase
user awareness of google products in india

15Phone Interview:
1) Design a Washer and Dryer - You need to ask the
interviewer questions about who the users would be. When I

asked him, he said "The same sort of people who would buy
a nest thermostat (Younger, more tech savvy and somewhat
affluent).
2) How would you measure the success of Apple's WWDC
event (This year vs Last Year). Note: The key here is to
discern the difference between the event itself being better
vs Apple releasing cooler stuff this year thereby getting more
press coverage etc.
3) How would you improve Youtube
Onsite:
1st Interview:
1) Latest trends in technology
2) What are the network implications of a handheld device
meant for elementary schools kids
3) If Google has invented a way to make air travel 4x
cheaper and 4x faster, what would you do with this
technology?
2nd Interview:
1) Design an app for the dmv
2) Explain recursion to my grandma
3) You have an ecommerce site in Spain and you've just
localized this and now see that traffic has reduced. What
could be the reasons.
4) Give me 3 features you like about your favorite google
product and 3 that you would improve.
3rd Interview:
1) How would you improve throughput of an airport by 100%
2) You've done all this stuff to improve throughput , what are
the implications for the airport itself
3) How much storage space is required to host all the images
of Google street view.

4) You see starbucks' on either side of the road sometimes,

why do you think Starbucks Corp does this?
15
How would you design a bike based delivery
service
16
YouTube traffic went down 5%. How would you
report this issue to Larry Page
Check traffic for each of the following:
Region
Time
Server capacity
Types of videos
Site-speed
User segments
17. Market for Driverless cars
start by clarifying
> What market ? - US ?
> What type of car ? or just generally across all cards ?
> What is driverless ? - is it literally that driver is optional or
there is just no place for a driver at all ? i.e. is the car such
that even if I wanted to drive I couldn't.
let's think about car market today
> how many people drive the cars let's say it's x% of
300million = car drivers
> total cars sold in the US every year = % of card drivers
who replace cars
> you can factor is growth from now to 2020 or just assume
that similar # of cars are sold in 2020.
> assuming current trends - one would expect that maybe

small, compact cars would be driverless first - with that

assumption take % of cards sold in 2020 that fit that type of
car.
> altogether we now know the conventional cars sold within
the category for which we would launch a driverless car
Next who is the buyer ?
> he/she drives car today
> takes a taxi
> doesn't use car (does not want to drive)
so let's say we are left with a number that 10 million cars
sub compact cars are sold in the US presumably to a car
driver.. so that means there are about 10million card drivers
who buy a compact car every year.
Next since this is just 3-4 years away assuming that such a
car was just launched a year ago (2018) then we are going
to only have "early adopters" trying this out - so the % of
early adopters out of those 10 million can use the size of the
market (at least a partial answer)
> if the car is dual use, i.e. driverless or with driver than
adoption rate will go up significantly so we can up the % of
early adopters accordingly.
next we could calculate
> how many people who previously didn't ride will start
riding in a car now
> how many taxi/commercial cars will be driverless
that should give us a good estimation
1. Design an alarm clock.

2. 00 floors in a building - 3 main occupants - top 10 floors

(company 1), next 90 floors evenly split, top 45 company2,
bottom 45, company 3. Design the elevator system.
3. 8% drop in hits to Google.com. Larry Page walks into your
office asks you to think about what the reasons might be.
Enumerate.
4. Tell me about the most difficult interaction you had at work.
5. Name a non-Google product you've recently used - what do
you think of it, how could it be improved. What if a feature you
designed and managed is deemed to have poor ROI - defend it
and the analysis of the data that is presented to you.
6. How many reviews are written in a month on yelp.com. You
have no data and no access to any data. Estimate.
7. Design a car for blind people. Enumerate the use cases.
Prioritize them. Justify everything with sound logic.