Google Interview Flashcards
How would you increase adoption of Google’s Fiber to the Home product?
Customer: Urban/Suburban, city dwellers, strongest with younger technically aware. Want fast speeds, consistency, and a low price. Caps are a consideration.
Possible solutions: 1) lower price, 2) faster speed, 3) discount bundle with things like Google Fi, YoutubeTV, or Stadia.
Strengths are google brand vs comcast. Need to make a simple change choice and pricing to win over ordinary users who dislike comcast
Big challenge is availability. Investment needs to be made in infrastructure.
Pricing can be temporaily match by competitor, speed wars can be matched as well. With people ditching cable and home phone, focus on straightforward pricing, focus on internet only or bundling with other google services.
Tell me a digital product you use nearly every day. How would you go about building a competitor to it?
Twitch
Customers are gamers who play and watch.
Would measure hours spent per month, both watching and streaming, number of viewers, number of streamers. Interaction with the streams.
Integration with the games you watch to have rewards and engagement with streamers/developers
Developers can use the APIs to show rewards for watching their game, a mix between twitch rewards and in game rewards. Drive ongoing engagement with the game and motivate streamers.
Rewards for both streamers and watchers.
For Google, closely integrate Stadia with YouTube to incentive people to stream directly to YouTube. Offer better (easier to use) software that improves on having to use 3P software like Twitch.
You have to build a disaster management app for the Olympics. How are you going to go about this?
List out the possible disasters for the area
Customers who are using it, atteneeds, locals, first responders, Olympic employees.
Biggest needed features: 1 Alert system. 2 Directions on what to do and where to go based on 1) user type 2) location, 3) any info on mobility or user needs. 3. Report alert for users to map out biggest issues. 4. Prioritize for first responders.
Trade off between simplicity and usefulness.
End solution is more advanced for first responders and employees who can be trained, as simple as possible for attendees.
Attendees- Register, mobility profile, simple notifications (amber alert style), directions on where to proceed via maps, track families, report issues to first responders.
Employees- Notifications- registration of assignments, step by step directions, coordination with other employees, reporting for first responders.
First responders- Prioritized the submissions from employees and attendees on issues. Direct in an optimized way. Show overall tracking and allow HQ to send notifications.
How will you scale a wildly successful food truck business?
Issues to consider: 1) labor costs 2) food quality consistency, 3)cannibalization
Look at data for what makes it successful, is it the location? What are the qualities about the location and where can you find those qualities elsewhere?
To solve: 1) have employees flex to different locations based on need and allow to cover each other’s shifts, 2) prep as much as possible in central locations to maintain consistency. 3) space the trucks out to build on brand organically in area but not cannibalize. Need a balance between locations and costs. Figure out idea number of commercial kitchens to support.
Select your favorite app. Tell me what you like about it. How can you improve it?
Ring-detect when im the one coming home and dont notify me. Face sync with my august lock.
Google trips- group planning, proposing locations and voting/polls, collecting payments and distributing group bills, auto fill everyone’s traveler info.
How would you implement Chrome for kids?
Chrome for kids has two customers, parents and kids.
success metrics are parent feedback, kid engagement, user acquisition, metrics need to take into account time limits.
Parents want to be able to control access to sites
Ability to block sites
Ability to only allow a specific list of sites
View kids requested sites
Restrict time
Kids want to view content as easily as possible
Timer that shows how much time left
Approved sites
Request site access
Ability to earn more time by working through Chrome for kids educational programs
Describe your work experience in 3-4 minutes?
Entrepreneur that had a product idea in college
Entered into competition, media attention, took momentum and spun it into a business and secured investors
Experimenting and learning through direct action
Wound down due to lawsuit and market force changes (phone size)
Started building things at Amazon instead, started with Services product, went from around 75 to 200 vendors involved, $10M business.
Wanted to grow with technology but the team was not a tech team. Moved to a tech org to build software
Last 3 years started negotiation software from scratch. Started small with US only launch and 4 engineers, now own 3 related products with 12 engineers, 8 countries so far and over $1B of business impact.
Design alarm clock for blind person
Customer needs to 1) know the time, 2) set and manage alarms.
Physical alarm clock, or application?
Application by voice already exists on most phones so maybe consider a hardware play.
Options are to have physical buttons with braille and or numbers they can feel, or go all audio.
For physical you need large easy to find buttons with braille and maybe have the time called out by voice or have tactile options.
Tactile option can be vibration or little mechanical dots that raise and lower.
Watch device can sync with other options both physical and digital across the home.
One option is audio, very similar to the features you can get from google home. Tell the device to set alarms, cancel, snooze, ask for the current time. Maybe include a visual display for partners that may not be blind. But this already exists.
How would you monetize Gmail?
Ads
Increase add effectiveness
Look at types of promotional emails get opened
Use the other google ads profiling as well.
Include pictures and other media
“Best Deals Filter/Tab” Take all of the promotional and advertisement that the user gets and use machine learning to predict which deals they would actually be interested by taking into account all Google History, click rate, etc. Advertisers have to opt in to be able to qualify for best deals and negotiate a rev share. Tricky because you want to actually surface the best deals.
Corporate accounts
Considered-Advanced features but then risk alienating customers who are used to everything being free. Advanced feature would be to let users set up different folders to filter to with Google Executive Assistant and use feedback based ML to sort mail into different folders, the user would train the model for their individual messages and preferences. Pay a monthly fee for the subscription or bundle with other services.
Balance between intrusiveness of ads and effectiveness.
Estimate number of vacuums sold in the US
Number of families 350M Americans, average family size is 4, 87.5M families
Number of vacuums per family 1 average, some may have none, others have multiple
Lifetime of vacuums 5-8 years? 7-8 vacuums in lifetime per family. 20-80 as vacuum buying window
10M ish vacuums per year
THings to think about, the longer people are single the more vacuums they will have. As vacuums shift from big machines that you repair to buy and replace the number will increase. Roombas become more popular, people may have multiple for different floors.
Why Google?
Tech focus, customer focus, great brand equity with products people respect/trust. So many different areas of business, products that experiment and push the envelope. Want to work on thing that my friends and family actually use. Also saw that Google Trips is going away which I think there is untapped potential for the app and I wrote up a bit about how I would bring it back to life.
How would you design a better smoke detector?
Important features: notify people to get out, notify fire
Network connected, connected to speakers/phone
Alert users whether they are at home or not
Phone alerts, deactivatable by phone (important for high ceilings) Think WUPF from The Office.
Alarm on detectors in other rooms of the house
Alert fire if not deactivated within certain time period.
Battery level monitor, battery operated or plug in with battery backup. Solar powered?
Design an new iPad app for Google spreadsheet.
Need to prioritize buttons to be selectable by touch, simplify. Get data on most used functions
Create functions that are available by swiping and other gesture actions like moving to a new sheet, new cells/rows, etc. a way to click and drag for selection. Get data on what the most difficult operations are without a mouse and focus on how to make these intuitive.
How many queries per second does Gmail get?
1.5 billion users
Types: reads (20-30, writes 2-10, searches 1-5 overall somewhere between 25-35 queries per user per day. 30 average. 30 per person per day. 30/24hrs/60min/60 sec = queries per person per second * 1.5B= 500k per second
How would you improve Google Maps?
Accuracy in bad traffic situations, machine learning on typical traffic information and cross-reference with waze user reports to modify bad traffic by crash/police/fire etc.
Right now places you have navigated to show up first in results for similar searches, restaurants etc, but also should use data about where you have been even if you didn’t navigate there. This is the most interesting to dive into.
Commute alerts when you wake up about possible routes to take or leaving earlier/later than usual.
How would you reduce Gmail storage size?
Enforce an auto-archiving for old items and compress files for saving space but takes longer to retrieve
Notify users about setting up auto-auto archive or auto delete.
Bulk unsubscribe available to users and suggest items to unsubscribe to or archive based on engagement. This is could be huge because 95% of my inbox is spam and there is not a great way to prevent this. Maybe even use ML to detect spam and low engagement and show a page of all of the things to unsubscribe to and let the user do it in bulk, this cuts things out at the source and you can implement archiving or compression solutions after for even more effectiveness.
How would you improve restaurant search?
User profile that shows the tendencies of types of restaurants.
Use navigation to restaurants, location data of restaurants and visits, as well as reviews of not only that person but user profiles similar to that person (ML) for profile similarity. Not just what people have searched for but location data, for instance, my wife does most of the research and I attend. Could even use photo data to determine if people are really excited about the food, return visits, etc.
Incentivize to review restaurants that they visited. Discounts etc offered by restaurants for reviews and know who visited the restaurant to prompt.
What is your favorite app, what do you like and dislike?
Travel-maps
Like Auto-suggest places do go and things to do with sample itineraries, auto-pulls in flight and hotel information from email, saves locations to maps
Dislike- only works for one person, can’t coordinate with others, group pay, vote on activities, doesn’t save places I went to that I didn’t search, want to be able to share my whole itinerary/trip with others after the fact.
If you were to build the next killer feature for Google, what would it be?
Group travel- Google Trips
Advertising on shared computers. Detect who is using and adjust, encourage themes?. Public terminals rewards programs at cash registers instead of square/clover/fivestar? Sign in with face recognition on webcam?
Gaming streaming service to complement Stadia project that integrates rewards directly with streamers/watchers from developers/google
You’re part of the Google Search web spam team. How would you detect duplicate websites?
Look at titles, images, percentage of similar text. For internal duplicates:
The hosting provider is the same.
The IP addresses are the same. (Block A,B and C)
The theme is the same (websites are often built with Wordpress to have them up faster)
The wordpress plugins are the same.
The niche is repeated and the content is alike or is totally duplicated.
Sites are linked to each other, connected for the backlinks.
For external links where someone is copying someone elses site. Need to figure out which is the duplicate and which is the original. Check domain age? Utilize some sort of fingerprinting on original when it was indexed?
How many iPhones are sold in the US each year?
350M americans. Cell phone users are between 15-80 so maybe 80% of the population. 280M cell phone users. Users buy or upgrade cellphone every 2 years. So about 140M people buying a year. Iphone has around 40%ish market share 56M or so
Other factors, younger users may have second hand phones, consider entire secondhand market and take that into effect. Older users may upgrade less. Some people have multiple phones (work etc)
As the PM for Google Glass ‘Enterprise Edition,’ which metrics would you track? How do you know if the product is successful?
Number of queries per day, hours worn per day, actions taken per day, repetitive attempts at actions in a row, usage metrics over time. Number sold, repeat customers, tickets filed, surveys of users for improvement metrics, efficiency of employees.
If you were Google’s CEO, would you be concerned about Microsoft?
Tablet market is growing for MSFT, cloud computing advantage, enterprise software, gaming. Google products are in an increasing number of industries. Need to focus on innovating faster, tech infrastructure like internet/household devices, worry about other competitors like amazon and netflix.
Should Google offer a StubHub competitor? That is, sell sports, concert, and theater tickets?
Already has an infastructure for enterprise ticket, hotels/flights, users already have google accounts. If google can cut down on bots and beat ticketmaster on fees they could also offer better ad targeting for events etc.
