A Simple Approach to Product Management Strategy Questions

These questions are important for interviews at Google and other big tech companies. For startup product manager roles, the importance of strategy questions depends on the specific role. In early-stage companies, founders and PM leaders typically create and communicate strategy, while PMs focus on execution.

Why are Product Strategy questions important in a PM interview?

Product managers bring a business perspective to the product team. They understand the market, cost structure, go-to-market strategy, and growth vectors. They use this knowledge to create a compelling product vision that helps secure buy-in from the team and leadership. . Simply providing a list of 10 tasks for the next year fails to explain the rationale behind them and lacks the ability to inspire action from the team.

Strategy questions assess whether you fulfill the requirements of this particular aspect of the PM role.

How PM Strategy questions are scored?

A good answer to PM strategy questions should include following elements:

Analysis of market forces (customer preferences, competition, technological trends, etc.) to generate strategic insights.
Persuasive, concise product narrative
Balanced level of details to supplement high-level strategy

Candidates make mistakes on all three. Some candidates straightway jump to insight/strategy without taking the time to analyze different factors.

The more challenging aspect is sharing a compelling product narrative and balancing details. Some candidates only stay at high-level and give the impression that this strategy might not work in execution. Others share a lot of details (list of features and how it will work) and miss the big feature. The Product Design questions are there for firms to test whether you can define good product requirements documents.

Types of Product Strategy questions?

Strategy questions can be asked in multiple ways, but there are some established patterns.

General product strategy: Most frequently asked product strategy question. Typically of form — "You're PM for X. What should be the next 3-year strategy for X?". Some examples:

"You're PM for Google Maps. What should be Google Maps' 3-year strategy?"
It's Covid and Uber trips have gone down by 5X. As a PM leader, what will be your short-term and long-term strategy?
Netflix has lost 1Mn subscribers this quarter. As a PM leader tasked with handling this crisis, what strategy will you formulate?

The later two put you into a situation and then ask the same "strategy for X" question.

Market entry: The second common question type. "Should company X venture into space Y?"

Example: Should Google venture space technology?

This question type can also be asked in reverse — Should Amazon pull out of hardware investments?

One other question type is more open ended — what new industry firms X should venture in? To answer this question type, one would generally come up with a list of options and then evaluate against a set of factors like you do for market entry (but in brief).

In this blog, we will focus mostly on category 1 — general strategy questions, as they are more abstract and harder to answer for most candidates. The approach we'll discuss can be extended to other strategy question types.

High-level approach

In my experience, heavy frameworks don't fit well in PM interviews which are more light-weight and interactive (vs management consulting interviews). They can make you look robotic and overshadow real-life problem solving skills and brainstorming.

Instead, I recommend solving like a real-life problem. Best PM interview candidates take some time, ask clarifying questions, genuinely and precisely solve the problem, use design thinking approaches to do creative brainstorming, and conclude. Not different from how one would approach in real-life.

PS: This is one of most critical advice that I repeatedly share and for any interview questions including for Product Design interview. Don't take it as an academic exercise. This can make all the difference in the seriousness of the response, the kind of brainstorming you do, and thoughtfulness you bring to the interview. After all, the interview is about judging how you will perform in the role in real-life.

For Product Strategy question, a good answer should cover:

Why: Analysis of customers, market, trends etc to come with insights
What: A 1–2 line compelling product vision along with its major strategic pillars
How: Concrete features to showcase this vision can be executed

This simple approach can help you structure your answer for a variety of questions while keeping room for improvisation and creative thinking.

How to answer Product Strategy questions?

I would suggest making your own approach that answers the three broad questions — why, what, and how (as stated in previous section). General aspect of answering any interview questions still apply — ask clarifying questions, liberally take pauses to brainstorm, recap to give clarity to interviewer etc.

Here is my approach to answer PM strategy questions:

#1 Get clarity on scope and context:

Example of some questions that I will ask the interviews include:

Q: Is it global or just for the US? Q: Is it a 3-year or 5 year plan? Q: For just Google Cloud or Google's enterprise vision? Q: Given the product is still early in its lifecycle, I think the goal of strategy should be to increase adoption. Does that sound good to you?

#2 Analyze the market forces to come up with strategic insights

Then I would spend some time analyzing market forces relevant for the question (depends on product lifecycle, industry etc). But, in general, factors are:

Customer segments: Size, growth etc
Competition: Key bets, growth path, intensity of competition
Company: Strength and weakness
New trends: Hyper-localization, use of vernacular languages, AI, Metaverse etc.

This is where reading about a company's strategy, quarterly financial reports, tech trends etc is helpful.

Note the insights while doing this analysis. Example — adoption in GenX who will be the key for future growth in this product category, emerging use cases and interest in AI (competition announced multiple investment and a new entrant), high competition and low growth potential for product X.

#3 Come up with product vision its key pillars

Use the insights and goal to draft product vision and its key strategic pillars, which I suggest to keep 3.

Example: we should be building X that helps drive Y for Google. To do so we will invest in three strategic pillars: target genX, incorporate gen AI, and sunset product z.

PS: I generally try to come with 3 options for any questions. As a thumb rule, less than 3 is too few and more than 3 is too many.

#4 Brainstorm a few feature ideas for one of the pillars

Offer a few solution in increasing order of complexity for 1–2 strategic pillars

To brainstorm ideas, I've suggested a few idea in my blog on Product Design interviews

I don't recommend jumping into measuring success of this strategy (metrics), communication of this strategy (depends on audience), and execution. Neither have I seen interviewers interested in exploring this in strategy questions. The skills required to come with these are measured in analytical, product design, or execution (craft) questions.

I can use this approach to solve market entry questions as well. While analyzing forces mostly you want to answer following to build the product narrative:

Customer: Is the market/problem big enough
Competition: Are existing products not solving the customer problem
Company: Can you leverage existing strength to solve customer problem better than the competition
Trends: Helpful at times, as often emerging technology or customer preference enables new entrants to solve the customer problem better.

Some helpful tips:

Don't make product strategy a product design question: Ensure strategic pillars have variety and are broad (not a feature or feature set). Spend less time on how the feature works. Otherwise, the interviewer will not get sufficient time to judge your business strategy skills.
Present a cohesive picture: Feature should align with strategic pillars. Context should play a role. If you had restricted the problem space to the US, don't come up with features for Asia or the world.
Liberally take time to brainstorm and structure your through when jumping from step to step. That also gives time for the interviewer to reflect everything in notes :)
Don't talk about features that have already been launched as an outcome of your proposed strategy. If a feature is already in use, talk about how you can improve it or expand it. Don't propose it as a new feature (common mistake).
One way to practice is to try to make sense of different company's strategies. Checkout the earnings call or product launches. Is there a theme or strategic direction?

If you don't remember any of these tips, remember to solve it like a real-life situation and not make it a Product Design question.