"What's the North Star Metric for Google Calendar?" | Google PM Mock Interview

Key Takeaways

hi everyone my name is bijan from product management exercises and today i'm here with chris from seattle who's recently joined google cloud um and he hasn't started yet but he's one of the users of product management exercises and he was able to use the site to prepare for the pm interviews and land the job at google cloud today we're going to do a product manager interview question but first i'd like to invite chris to introduce himself and then we can get started hi everyone my name is chris madison uh i'm currently a senior pm or have been a senior product manager at enginex or f5 networks i recently joined google i haven't actually started yet but i have about eight years of product management and experience a master's degree in information systems and business and uh yeah i think that's the quick highlights all right well thank you so much so we'll get started so the question that we're going to do today is what is the north star metric for google calendar awesome and i have a ipad here i'm kind of writing on so if you see me kind of jotting notes down i am working on the problem not just doodling okay so i like to kind of go with a structure that looks something like and i and from whenever i try to think about north star metric questions i i try to structure my answer in a way that is uh i first like worked asked some clarifying questions to make sure i understand the problem or the product uh in the scenario that we're trying to we're trying to uh measure um and i usually like to do that by kind of maybe asking those questions uh maybe discussing the business or mission of the product uh talking through the user actions and then kind of looking at a list of metric categories they're kind of like a go-to that quite frankly every pm should uh should know intimately um and then within those uh within that category i like to choose a specific one and then kind of dive deeper and get to something more definitive and uh smart if you will um so so yeah so that's kind of what my structure looks like at present um so first i have some clarifying questions we're talking about google calendar uh and google calendars typically fits within uh the g suite product right and i know as of late i kind of noticed google uh pivoting more towards enterprises so are we talking about northstar metrics for google calendar within g suite or just google calendar kind of as a whole kind of setting the g suite bit aside for now we can talk about google calendar as a whole and putting g suite aside for now okay just gcap okay um so we're gonna call this a maybe we'll focus on the b2c market today okay so those are kind of my two clarifying questions that present i may have more but uh we'll see if uh if there's others that come up as we work through this so so yeah so next i want to talk about the business and mission of of google calendar because i think that's helpful um and i usually like to think about um the vision uh mission and of the product within the vein of the mission of the organization um which google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible right um and so when i think about when i apply that kind of that organizational mission to you know any product that i use by google i look at it through that lens so let's talk about first um gmail like gmail organizes uh communications right um and then let's talk about drive drive organizes digital assets right and and files and then we think about calendar calendar organizes time right so uh so if the mission of google is to organize the world's information make it universally accessible the mission of google calendar might be um to organize uh you know user's time or the world's time and make it universally accessible right um so that's how kind of how i view uh the mission of google calendar does that make sense and uh would you agree with that yeah it makes sense i think you write that on google is really in the business of organizing world's information and i like how you basically describe what that means for google calendar awesome so let's talk about this for a moment um yeah so like now that we've like gotten past the the mission of of the product uh i kind of want to talk about the users and focus on what are the key actions that they're doing because ultimately when i think about northstar metrics i find that their best the most effective ones are rooted in actions that the user takes that ultimately allows them to gain the most value from the the product right yeah so when i think about uh when i think about these user actions i i probably would say uh the thing that kind of jumps out at me at me is like creating invites okay and invites can be um uh with uh one to one to many um participants including just yourself right um and then i would say uh attending is another one i like to um i like to use and also attending invites and then maybe like uh probably accepting invites right so if the goal of the product is to make folk make time universally accessible for our users helping them create invites um and invite like you know to invite others um kind of gauging the whether or not people are are accepting those invites and then kind of gauging whether the meeting actually happens i think is is really the the the true measure of success is if our users are doing the thing that they said they would be doing at that time right um and there's a couple different ways we could we could measure this or we could we could kind of go about approaching that but for now let's kind of move on to uh we'll actually pause there um to see if they're to see if those kind of make sense as key user actions and if there's any others that you'd like me to considering i think i think it's fine um i think the the user actions that you came up with make sense um so feel free to continue yeah and there's definitely others like we could look at uh times you move a calendar event that shows usage times you read or open a calendar event that shows intent to to take action on it in some way shape or form um but i think ultimately adding more to the uh to the product versus just reading something that's already there is probably going to be more indicative of health of the product or or success so and actually let me just make sure is this the north star metric for google calendar or is it success it's a north star metric i'm starting metric okay perfect um so yeah so that's so of those three um i'm not going to choose a user action to focus on let's actually talk about some metric categories that we could go down to kind of uh see if it makes sense for us to to choose one or the other the user actions as a point of focus so typically with metric categories um we have uh we have a couple um adoption right are people adopting it two engagement are people engaging with your product three the people that have engaged previously or adopted are they being retained uh so retention um there's also uh conversion which i think maybe doesn't apply in this scenario um specifically since it's a free product uh but also uh i think about like revenue is like another one that i kind of look at there's also like happiness and some other ones uh like task uh success that you can look at um and but i think the the uh for this google calendar the kind of outside outside of the the key metrics that i would use to to track health right it's a well-established product and i think just to be clear i think g street as a like gmail has like 1.5 billion active or accounts and by virtue of that i think you get calendar when you sign up for gmail as well so uh you could potentially say there's 1.5 billion users uh calendar users maybe 10 of those are are active just the high level off the top of my head i kind of uh guesstimate there um so maybe there's like let's call it 100 maybe 150 million users uh uh maybe daily active or monthly active something of that nature let's go with monthly active for the 100 million um and that's just to kind of like think about it's like well if we have a hundred million active users 1.5 billion accounts i can probably adoption isn't really the problem that we're trying to solve here right um i don't think right we're so i'm gonna go ahead and strike off adoption number one from the list um if i were in a b to b scenario and i don't kind of want to policy and talk about this i think it's really important if we're looking at this through a b2b lens meaning we're looking at jeep we're including g suite i'd probably want to focus my time on tracking enterprise adoption because ultimately paid account or or growth rate within enterprises is going to be probably one of the most the most important metrics so um so i want to say that like huge caveat around me striking out adoption but let's go ahead and strike it out for now for b2c would you uh agree with that um so can you just quickly give me a summary so you said that you think adoption right now um is not the main uh it's not so important because about 10 you think of like gmail users have already adopted it did i understand you right uh i think well i think you you get calendar with gmail if i recall correctly so you sign up for a google account kind of get all of it so just by virtue of people signing up for calendar they're kind of signing up for or signing up for gmail they're kind of signing up for calendar so there's potentially already 1.5 billion accounts that exist in the world um for google gmail and google calendar because they're kind of one package right um and then of those maybe 10 of those 1.5 billion users are maybe monthly active users uh so maybe 100 million to 150 million monthly active users for calendar which is still a really healthy number um so gaining more users at this point isn't you know for product like calendar doesn't seem like it is the thing that you like hang your hat on it's like yeah we gain like another point one percent of users it's like that's great let's you know what what else can we do to track the true success and health right it's i would if i was going to look at a growth i'd be looking more so a churn or retention or something like that are we losing users at this point since we already have such a high number got it okay so that's why i started the adoption off the list engagement is interesting that's number two on the list um and i have about six of them here so i'm going to get through these pretty quickly engagement i'm not going to strike it off because i think it's useful i mean we'll come back to that one retention i think is useful so i'm not going to strike it off um conversion as a metric category i think i can strike off conversion because you're not really converting from like a a non-paid user to a paid user in calendar um you may potentially convert from like a uh like a light user calendar to a power user which we can look at through that that lens as well um and i think there's some there's probably something we could do there but for now i'm going to kind of set it aside so i think it's interesting but maybe not the most important metric um of like the the north star or like the health revenue is an interesting one because it's a free product so i think looking at revenue as your north star metric is maybe not the best approach and i don't even think there's ads within calendar either so i don't think that's going to be something that we look at on a day-to-day basis hat success i'd say is normally really important um if your product is new and and people you're just kind of just starting out but google calendar is well established um and i can't remember the last time i was unable to do like create a calendar and invite someone it it kind of nails the basics really really well so task success at this point um maybe isn't a north star metric that i'm looking at um so then you know of the remaining list there's kind of engagement and retention um you know when i think about other calendar tools out there i i there's other ones that exist like oh interesting sorry i just i just have a thought and i'll come back to it um there's other calendars that exist but i don't really see like users using a different calendar other than google calendar if they're really heavily invested in one other than maybe the one that comes native on their phone so that's actually i sorry i just like kind of had this inspirational thought which is like well maybe [Music] like yeah because like if you have an iphone you may just use your the apple calendar right so maybe the north star metric or the way i'm looking at health is the number of people that have calendar on their phone um versus or have downloaded the mobile app some something like that just i it just was a bit of inspiration so i kind of want to just jot it down here as a as a potential user action which is like application downloads okay and i think this one's interesting um but it kind of own it's only one platform so i think that's a kind of a limiting factor why would probably not choose it as a north star metric but i think at this point if you're using you know if we talk about conv this could kind of fall into the conversion bucket which is like converting people from using apple map apple calendar to uh google calendar would be a potential success metric but again if you you're successful at that it's kind of short-lived so i kind of don't like using that one either so even though it kind of came to me as a thing i'm going to strike off the list as north star engagement and retention um retention i don't think people are leaving google calendar i don't think retention's a problem so i'm not that's not really something that i'm going to look at uh in deep detail as my north star and and i kind of want to caveat this is like even though i'm i've kind of whittled everything down to engagement right that's the final metric category and then we'll dive into a deeper like a very specific engagement metric that we can track and that um is tied to that we're going to basically put up on a dashboard in the engineering room like when this number goes up we're doing well it goes down we're really bad right that's like our goal with these north star metrics as a product manager i have like tagged out this we are going to be looking at all of these things right truly if you're a great product manager you're looking at adoption you're looking at engagement retention conversion revenue and task success you're looking at happiness right you're looking at the whole gamut um but if we're trying to get to like just the one thing that you like that is going to drive the team to do like to make the experience better i think it's going to be engagement and so engagement is typically rooted in user actions uh so i'm going to go ahead and start engagement and let me just pause there before i move further to see if you would like to go down a different path because if you want to choose retention or conversion we can we can also do those but i want to make sure that i give you the opportunity to chime in here yeah i think it's it's good to pick engagement um i think that it's a very uh meaningful um area to basically focus on so let's continue with engagement and uh yeah let's go down yeah let's let's go down that path so then we have like other three user actions that we kind of mentioned before there's creating invites accepting invites and attending invites um so of like if we had if i had to choose one of these to kind of structure my uh metric my key or northside metric around accepting invites is is interesting um i think it because the goal is to get people to come together right to make that time accessible and it a measure of accessibility is whether or not um it's actually being used to uh to have meetings with more than or have invites with more than one person right is what i think when i think about accessibility in a sense not like the um uh user experience accessibility term that is often used for designing experiences for folks that may have a disability uh so so i kind of want to it's part of me is leaning towards accepting the other part is i could make a case for creating and i think creating is good because you're basically starting it's like the bare minimum of like no matter every like you're basically capturing folks that have uh created invites for themselves just because like i i often create account events where there's no invitees right or no other attendees just myself for like cooking dinner or cleaning the kitchen um and then there's other ones that i create like going to going to dinner with friends and you know pre-covered um so so yeah so so if you go with just creating invites then you capture kind of both of those scenarios if you go with accepting um then you're not really capturing um you're kind of missing out on the ones i create for just myself yeah unless we look at accepting invites as invite because i think you automatically accept an invite if you're the organizer so potentially we could use a workaround for that with accepting um but let's talk about it attending first i don't wanna i just wanna like get my thoughts out there just to show you kind of how i'm thinking an approaching problem and and then we'll and then we'll kind of dive into one so let's talk about attending invites um so attending invites is really the the core the core piece of the platform right he's like you're if you can if you've got two people to meet you know virtually via the phone or in person that is true success because uh for achieving the mission of organizing people's users times and make making it uh universally accessible because it's organized they're organized enough to find a slot to agree to agree to meet and then they actually meet right that's that's they come together i think that's the like the one that i would really love to be able to measure um but well that may be the north star metric that i like to choose trying to if i went to my engineering team and said hey we i want to measure when two people are in a space and whether or not their calendar event says that they should be doing this thing and where they are they might they might pose signific some some challenges there right to work through uh from a feasibility perspective so even though i might really like attending the the feasibility we may not be able to get there just yet so i think ultimately that's where i'd like to go um uh to see if like is the user said they were going to cook dinner are they actually cooking dinner at this time that's like the true measure of success for the product the user said they're going to be at the coffee shop meeting you know roger at this time are they actually meeting roger at this coffee shop at this time but again feasibility privacy so many concerns around tracking that right so i want to be conscientious about our users so maybe we'll start with something a little a little lighter with maybe just accepting invites and um and i'm going to go with accepting because um number of invites that have been accepted because it's when the user is uh if they created by themselves we'll assume that they're they've accepted it because they wouldn't have created it right um and then we'll look at the number of and then also we'll capture scenarios where the user has invited someone else and they both accept right um and i think we'll if i had to like you know weed out invites like if i'd say okay what do the non-exceptions look like it looks like when uh more than 50 of the required uh participants decline potentially right it's maybe a decent measure so if you invite four people and they're all required um and then that there's a well you invite three people including yourself in the meeting um uh two decline and one uh says yeah i'm willing to show up and i think that's we potentially count that as either success or failure so i would probably call that uh a potentially a a failure if you were if you had three half of the people that are required to be the meeting actually aren't attending um but if those other two people were optional and that one person who accepted was required then i'd say probably that is uh accepted that's probably like a good scenario because you're getting most of the people that you need to have that meeting um and also there's some challenges with this because not everyone uses the optional field as intended um or as uh optional means a lot of different things to folks uh depending on what company you work in uh what uh you know whether you're it's more of an fyi versus a like hey i'm gonna be here be great if you could make it and making them required to like entice them to come versus actually expecting them to come there's all kinds of ways you can use that field so um so then let's so now if i kind of talk through my thought process about the user actions i kind of want to dive into a very specific metric does that kind of make sense and do you kind of agree with this uh with with going down the path of accepting invites as our primary uh user action yeah that works so as we're kind of wrapping up um if accepting invites is our uh primary um our primary uh northstar or our youth primary user action and engagement is our primary uh metric category it's i would probably say that the specific uh northstar metric that i would use would be um it's probably like two twofold it's like number of uh accepted invites um maybe over time so like i want to say like um maybe per month or per quarter is i might be looking at this and then you can even go with uh you know on a weekly basis as well i think you'll get i think weekly is a little more challenging because you may get some variability week to week i mean that may cause cause some like uh some some potential bombs to go off unnecessarily um but if you go on them on the larger time scale on a month if there is a problem with you know uh invites dropping off you're not going to really get that signal um you're basically getting a you're coming late to the game there's a month delay and you're actually getting warned of a potential issue so i might look at i might look at kind of weekly monthly and quarterly as a on a dashboard or something like that um just for to make sure i'm thinking about this in a holistic way and i if there are any issues i can quickly troubleshoot them and resolve them um so then the next one and so then like getting the number of accepted uh accepted invites is is great you know on a per month per quarter per week basis i also want to look at the growth of those um looking at the year-over-year growth of those accepted invites i think would be really valuable yeah and those are the two that kind of jump out at me as the north star metrics that i would like track for uh if i chose engagement as my primary metric category if i chose uh accepting invites as my primary user action to orient my engagement in does that kind of make sense and let me pause there to see if there's any questions yeah no that makes sense yeah awesome yeah and this totally could have gone anyway to be honest which is the one of the great things about uh interviewing is we could go down any one of these rabbit holes and uh and arrive at a similarly interesting and complex answer um but yeah so thank you for for doing this this is this is fun yeah thank you so much for taking the time um i i really liked your answer i think your answer was like really well structured um you started off with a really good clarification question which was is this b2c or b2b um and that makes a lot of difference i think that was a really good question and you tied google calendar really well to google's mission and they're like their core competency which is um ability to organize information i think that was really good then you talked about um the stories um you looked at the metric categories you explained why some categories don't make sense and why some makes more sense and then you prioritize them um you i think you explained really well why some metrics such as happiness and revenue are not a priority here and like what's the thinking behind prioritizing engagement um and then you went down the path of like really breaking down the engagement metrics in terms of like user actions such as creating invites attending them and accepting and then really explaining your thinking behind why i'm in your opinion accepting matters more than creating invite and attending as a metric for now i think it was really well structured um to be honest i think the answer was great um couple small tweaks and feedbacks that i would have is potentially when you talked about adoption i think there are different ways to define adoption um i think one question is does signing up for gmail basically suffice in terms of like saying that somebody is now a um google calendar user or adopted user and maybe definition of adoption is like um you have to have visited google calendar at least once or you have to have created at least one event or accepted one maybe that gets too close to the activation part but i think there is argument to be made that adoption can be improved even though there's a lot there's a large number of people that are using gmail i mean i think an example is like my father uses gmail but i don't think he's ever used google calendar yeah so that's that's i think one um interesting area that i kind of noticed um i think the other part was really interesting how you explained on why accepting um is really important and i think one argument that maybe could be made about why creating invite is also important is creating invite can also enable attending and accepting um and potentially drive those metrics as well but i think your argument was very sound on why accepting is important and maybe if you have if you are basically have a very good acceptance number then you go and actually optimize for creation and like drive creation because now you know that everybody who creates will have a good experience because people are accepting it and basically the the product is built um in a way that has a high acceptance rate um so thank you so much for the answer i really enjoyed it i'm sure the pme community really appreciates the mock interview and the good job with your new job at google cloud thank you thank you and love the feedback got to say i i love your approach to uh to talking about adoption because i think that's that is one that uh is really important so thank you all right thank you very much and for everybody who's watching um please feel free to subscribe to our youtube channel and visit our website at productmanagementexercises.com if you're preparing for a pm job interview at any of the tech companies around the world thank you and have a good day