Google Product Manager Execution Interview: YouTube Watch Time Root Cause Analysis

Watch our mock Google PM interview. Kevin Wei (Coinbase PM) asks Cherrie, Google PM, an execution interview question: YouTube comments are up, but watch time is down. What do you do?

Chapters -
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:41 Question
00:00:55 Clarifying questions
00:01:48 Answer
00:18:58 Summary
00:19:37 Follow-up questions
00:22:08 Interview analysis

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[umg]

My key take aways..

If faced with a new launch situation -
1. Think about what kind of feature was it (UX, UI, Backend, Algo)
2. Discuss and clarify launch criteria - what were the metrics that were decided
3. Discuss the tradeoffs that were decided with the launch

Keep in mind the User Attention Span with UX(Social Media) platforms

Also, ask how are the other related metrics trending.

When it is a downtrend metric question - Breakdown the metric to - Geography, Technology, Time, Trend, Source, Category

[abhicse]

Her communication skill and clarity of thoughts are spots on. She never trembled. Very calm and confident approach.👏

[anuradhatempe]

I wish I get to this level in terms of deep diving and confidence during my interviews, this was a great one to watch. Thanks for posting

[NdubisiOnuora]

This is an excellent response, but it could have been made more concise. Bringing what she described in the beginning to the end made it seem like an awesome chess move. Definitely, she is an intuitive most likely an INTP. If I were a tired interviewer, I would zone out during the interview, because she took too long to get to the point.

[amitkupadhyay]

One of the best and confident responses to the RCA kind of questions. Loved the way she started with pre-cursors to this launch rather than diving straight into the usual framework of asking clarifying questions. Always good to get the bigger picture first.

[looppp]

I am impressed by how still the interviewer can be. I thought the screen froze for a second lol.

[justinching]

I felt like she definitely rambled and could have been more concise

[Theatriics]

Great video, I loved watching her go super in depth. I'd love to see her do a mock interview again for a non-Google product though, as I'm not sure how normal this would be for an interviewee with no prior working knowledge of the product they're interviewing for.

[ThatTeluguGirl]

Have a Google interview in 4 hours. Wish me luck!

[Theartsygalslays]

Excellent trade-off and goal analysis!

One thing that I didn't hear the analysis hit on as deeply till the very end, and which would be a base hypothesis from my perspective, is around comment QUALITY -- she did surface the concern about spam, but that isn't an only concern with comment integrity. One reason some videos have comments turned off completely is exactly this concern with quality: bullying in comments, trolling, etc. (none technically spam per se). Even valid comments can be dissuading: it's possible that users scroll through the comment content before even deciding to engage with the video, and they might leave / click away if discouraged (though again, we should be able to see some scroll activity through the comments, in that case, and the click path -- e.g., whether they click back to the search results or to one of the recommendations from there). We could possibly look at whether there's additional reduction in other activity: for example, are viewers doing less than before initial playback (first 10 s), skips forward, etc., because they already got what they needed out of comments and the video description?

[niveditya]

Is it just me or did anyone feel that the conversation was very one sided ? I felt that there weren't enough check ins with the interviewer.

[CollectConnectDots]

This is one of the best interviews on metrics questions. The interviewee clearly demonstrates that the deep knowledge she has on each part of the YouTube features.

[Freshmarketers]

10:18 Kevin watching like, he is in love. Great video, love the flow of the conversation 😃

[umangjain]

Some of the key takeaways for me atleast are:

Consideration of YouTube Layout across both Web and Mobile App.

Consideration of language semantics across countries in the comments section.

She pulled this execution nicely. However, these days we see Ads just below the comments and then the recommended videos. But overall a great mock for an aspiring PM like me.
Thank you Exponent ❤

[nehadhr]

Very good response from her. Got an insight on how actually product managers think on a daily basis when making a go/no-go decision or when diagnosing some issue. However, I felt that this interview could have been more interactive instead of her laying forward all scenarios and then making her own assumptions.

[sawmilljoseph]

I really liked how the interviewee started with questions, looked at evidence, then hypothesized a potential cause.

[jessecuster]

Is this guy even a human? He hasn't blinked for like half an hour!!

[DhruvGhulatiG]

I thought this might have been improved at the start. She tries to explain pre-launch criteria, saying "it depends on what the % metrics were on comments engagement vs. watch time, and we would just decide on that",
I would have maybe done this framework:

- Clarify the feature that was launched and what it looks like e.g. the UI
- Understand the metrics and how they are calculated
- What was the exact metric numbers and averages, any idea?
- Clarify if the metric changes were global, on specific versions on mobile, specific geos, demographics etc

Then, see why this might have happened:
- External - did something external impact the launch? e.g. competitors launching? Is this across the entire YouTube e.g. watches going down overall not just due to the launch? Did we change the make-up of the videos to be shorter? Were there some other platforms that people find YouTube videos e.g. Facebook or Twitter impacted?
- Internal - were there other products in the launch that launched in same time that caused watch time? Did the feature only launch on short videos by accident due to a bug? Did people engage with the comments more than the videos so naturally watch time went down? Did we change the UI in some way that cannibalised focus on the videos watched? Was engagement on comments more on short videos than long videos which affected the mix?
- Out of control - was there something that caused the watch time to be decreased?

[ashishbarick]

gosh the interviewer is so mortifying! the poker face can get anyone nervous. great video btw.

[NdubisiOnuora]

This is the best interview from Exponent.