I’ve been getting a TON of questions about how to prepare for domain specific product management interviews for Google Cloud, and honestly I don’t have a straightforward answer. But I’m going to attempt it anyway.
To begin with, per my understanding, the domain specific interviews are unique to PM roles in Google Cloud. As Google is trying to build a larger market share in the cloud space, it makes sense that they are filtering for people with specialized knowledge. This domain specific portion of the interview only comes up if you make it to the on-site, so you don’t have to worry about it during the initial phone interviews.
Now for the actual interview itself, the interviewers test your domain knowledge both from a product perspective and a technical perspective. Your recruiter will give you a list of domains (and sub-domains) that you can choose from. Roughly though, they align with the portfolio of Google Cloud products and solutions.
The interesting piece is that you can pick a domain (or sub-domain) you feel comfortable with even if it isn’t what you want to work on at Google. For example, if I worked in cloud storage previously but I wanted to transition to AI/ML at Google, I would still pick storage as my domain because I know the ins and outs of it. By doing so, the product strategy type questions become easier as you ostensibly already know the market and the competitive landscape. Similarly, on the technical side, you’re not scrambling to learn about a brand new space.
This interview round is somewhat different from the usual technical rounds PMs at Google go through as those tend to focus more on system and application design. In Google Cloud, you have to think about platform design: the consumption layer for developers, the infrastructure layer for platform operators, the billing layer for administrators and so on.
These domain interviews are hard to prepare for since there’s no all-encompassing book or website available. It really depends on the domain you choose and how much experience you have in it. One suggestion I have to practice is to look at the “What’s New” section of the Google Cloud website. For every launch announced in your domain, think about how you would build that. Who are the customers? What are their requirements? At a high level, how would you design this product or solution? What are the technical building blocks?
Your recruiter is your best friend. Definitely ask about what types of questions to expect in this round and what interviewers might be looking for. As expected, there is variability in how these interviews go depending on the interviewer. But knowing what the interview rubrics are can go a long way in preparing correctly.
Good luck and feel free to reply with questions!
Thanks Nikitha for the insights. I have a critical question/doubt here. If someone does not have deep experience in any of the Google Cloud domains, which one should be chosen for the interview so that it would be easier and quicker to prepare for? What is your advice for a person who is equally familiar at very high level with the domains and who is trying to choose one of the domains that would avoid him/her getting in a situation of choosing extremely complex domain and failing the interview due to inability to prepare for it in the given duration.
For example, what should be top 3-5 picks from the following domains with their order of choice?
● AI-ML Product Strategy and Market Knowledge
● Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
● Compute
● Data Governance and Discovery
● Data Warehousing
● IAM
● Identity
● Internal Tools and Infrastructure Management
● Machine Learning
● Marketplace-Commerce
● Mobile
● SaaS
● Storage
Hi Amol – apologies, missed responding to your comment. Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer here since it’s entirely dependent on the individual. I would choose a topic that you feel you could get comfortable with in a short timeframe. The more narrow the topic the better but this could backfire since you can’t really redirect the question. Plus if the interview is going south, there’s no easy way out.