Google’s new Craft & Execution PM interviews

A memo and walkthrough for Product Alliance members | May 2022

In May 2022, Google PM recruiters announced that the company would be replacing its classic Technical
interviews for PMs (covering algorithm design, distributed system design, and internet technologies) with
a new interview category: Craft & Execution. Based on our recent conversations with hiring managers,
PM recruiters, and calibrated PM interviewers from Google, we’ve compiled this short guide explaining
what you can expect from Craft & Execution interviews, exclusively for Product Alliance members.

You should also see a new section on Craft & Execution interviews in the Flagship Google PM Interview
Course — as always, these updates are completely free to Product Alliance members like you. This section
includes new and reorganized video lessons, plus dozens of fresh new interview questions from the Craft
& Execution category.

A breakdown of Google’s updated PM interview framework 1

Context for the removal of Technical interviews 3

Caveats 4

What to expect in the Craft & Execution interview 4

The unusual style of Craft & Execution questions 6

Using Product Alliance to prepare for Craft & Execution interviews 6

If you’ve enrolled in other Flagship courses 7

Let us know what you learn in your Craft & Execution interviews 8

A breakdown of Google’s updated PM interview framework

Before explaining the details of the Craft & Execution interview, let’s recap the structure of Google’s PM
interview process and its rubrics.

For all roles — from PM to engineering to sales — Google evaluates candidates along three axes:

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 ❖ Role-Related Knowledge (RRK)
❖ General Cognitive Ability (GCA)
❖ Googleyness & Leadership (G&L)

Note that these axes don’t always map directly to specific roles’ interview rubrics; rather, they inform the
structure of said rubrics.

For PMs, the interview rubric for RRK breaks down roughly as follows:

❖ Product insight and design

❖ Strategic insights
❖ Analytical & problem solving
❖ Technical1
❖ Communication
❖ Creativity

GCA is not directly evaluated during the interview, but interviewers are told to ask challenging questions
that will indirectly test a candidate’s GCA.

The rubric for Googleyness breaks down as follows:

❖ Thrives in ambiguity
❖ Values feedback
❖ Effectively challenges status quo
❖ Puts the user first
❖ Does the right thing
❖ Cares about the team

The rubric for Leadership breaks down as follows:

❖ Manages projects
❖ Gets things done
❖ Works as a team
❖ Strives for self-development
❖ Coaches team*
❖ Empowers team*

1
Given the removal of the Technical interview, this item may eventually be removed from the PM rubric.
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 ❖ Shares vision and strategy*
❖ Helps with career development*

Items with an *asterisk only apply to candidates seeking people management roles.

Context for the removal of Technical interviews

While Google continues to prefer PMs with technical backgrounds, the company recognizes that an
increasing number of PM roles:

❖ Require non-standard technical skills (for instance, a PM working in consumer hardware would
have little use for knowledge of sorting algorithm design, yet would need to know the ins and outs
of LPDDR RAM);
❖ Focus more on business strategy or product strategy;
❖ Work more closely with cross-functional teams like business development, marketing, UX, PMM,
account management, rather than just with engineering; or
❖ Emphasize prioritization and execution, especially for more junior PMs.

In short, this change reflects the changing PM profession at Google. In the 2000s — when Google’s famous
technical interviews were first designed — almost all PMs at the company worked only with software
engineering teams and only built web apps. As a result, the technical interviews covered skills relevant to
that type of PM. This type of PM still exists, especially in Google Search, but PM at Google now spans a far
wider range of jobs, from growing payments in emerging markets to designing Google-branded hardware
to selling enterprise tools to Google Cloud customers. An increasing number of PMs at Google rarely work
with engineers at all, focusing instead on strategy or design. The old-style technical interview is not
relevant to many of these new types of PMs.

A major goal of technical interviews was to determine whether the candidate would be a good partner for
software engineering teams. PMs still work with engineering teams — that’s still their primary assignment
— but they increasingly work with cross-functional partners like the ones mentioned above. Working with
program managers, or PgMs, in particular has become increasingly vital for Google PMs as Google
products have grown in scope and scale. On a day-to-day basis, therefore, being skillful with
prioritization, execution, communication, cross-functional collaboration, and so on have become even
more important than knowing low-level technical concepts.

But before, Google had trouble testing these skills in PM interview candidates, especially since Technical
interviews only covered a narrow slice of the broad PM role. Craft & Execution questions are meant to be

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a more modern, flexible way to judge candidates on how well they’ll work with the rest of the team,
develop and launch products, and deliver value to users and the company.

According to Google PM recruiters, Craft & Execution interviews are also supposed to be easier and
more general-purpose than the old Technical interviews. If you’ve worked in product management or a
related role in the past, none of the questions in Craft & Execution will come as a complete surprise,
though of course they will still be difficult. This stands in contrast to Technical interviews, which would
punish PMs without a computer science education or experience answering software engineering-like
questions, such as those around algorithm design or distributed system design. In short, you’ll no longer
need to be proficient with “Leetcode” or “Hackerrank”-style interviews, unless your role specifically
involves such topics

Caveats
Note that Google still requires PMs entering certain parts of the company to have familiarity with the
technologies they’ll be working on; this is part of the RRK (role-related knowledge) mentioned earlier. If
you’re interviewing for a role on Pixel phones, for instance, the hiring manager will still be keen to know if
you understand concepts in connectivity, operating systems, hardware design, and so on. However,
non-relevant technical concepts (like distributed database design, in this example) will no longer be
covered.

Similarly, some areas may still require experience with certain technical domains. Google Cloud in
particular is well-known for wanting candidates to come in with prior cloud experience.

While Google is instructing PM interviewers to phase out the company’s classic technical interviews,
Google interviewers still get considerable leeway in designing their interview questions, so technical
questions may remain in the future, albeit in a smaller capacity. What’s more, many core technical
concepts (caching, sharding, TCP/IP, binary trees, heaps, sorting, etc.) may still be tested in other question
types, such as in Product Design questions.

What to expect in the Craft & Execution interview

Guidelines and rubrics for Google’s Craft & Execution interviews are still being developed, at the time of
writing, but what we know so far is that Craft & Execution interviews will cover the following rough areas:

❖ Prioritization, execution, and tradeoffs. Every product and engineering team has limited
resources, and there will always be more tasks, feature requests, and bug reports than you’ll have

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 bandwidth for. When you’re launching a product or developing a roadmap, will you be able to
evaluate tradeoffs and make the right decisions for the short and long term?
➢ Example question format: “Your product launches in N months, but you have 2N months’
worth of work to do. How will you prioritize the remaining work?”
➢ Video lessons for this category, including an interview tactics guide and examples of strong
answers (with our famous voiceover commentary) have been newly added to the Flagship
Google PM Interview Course.
❖ Product launches and landings. Naturally, pushing your product live is an essential part of the
product management job. But Google PMs have started embracing the mantra of “landings, not
launches” — launching a product is fine, but what really matters is its business impact. Can you use
the right tactics to launch a Google-quality product on time, and can you set it up for success over
the coming months and years?
➢ Example question format: “You’ve just developed product X. Tell me about your GTM plan,
including monetization, metrics, and reaching your first Y million users.”
➢ Video lessons for this category, including an interview tactics guide and examples of strong
answers (with our famous voiceover commentary) are included in the Flagship Google PM
Interview Course.
❖ Evolving your product. Similar to the above, it’s not enough to launch a shiny new product and
walk away. Are you able to identify areas for improvement and keep raising the quality bar in
subsequent iterations?
➢ These are identical to the Product Improvement questions that are already covered in the
Product section of the Flagship Google PM Interview Course.
❖ Crisis response. When you’re working at billion-user scale, things can and do go wrong: software
breaks, bugs are exposed, deadlines slip, legal and regulatory environments change, PR nightmares
emerge. As a PM, it’s your responsibility to rally and organize the cross-functional team to handle
these challenges and implement fixes and guardrails so they don’t happen again. Are you calm
enough under pressure to respond rationally, and do you have the leadership skills to coordinate a
decisive response to a crisis?
➢ Example question format: “You just launched your product, and X crisis occurred — it’s all
over the tech news. How would you lead the response?”
➢ Video lessons for this category, including an interview tactics guide and examples of strong
answers (with our famous voiceover commentary) have been newly added to the Flagship
Google PM Interview Course.
❖ Cross-functional teamwork and communication. PMs never work alone; it’s your job to
orchestrate your team’s many cross-functional partners — from UX to business development — to
keep the project moving and clear out open questions before they become blockers. How do you
work with your XFN peers, and what do you do if a team isn’t pulling their weight?
➢ Example question format: “In your experience, what are some characteristics of a
successful relationship between a PM and a cross-functional partner in role X?”
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 ➢ Video lessons for this category, including examples of strong interview answers (with our
famous voiceover commentary) are included in the Flagship Google PM Interview Course.
❖ Explaining technical considerations. You won’t be asked to design algorithms anymore, but you’ll
still have to be conversant with relevant technologies to develop strategies and help make decisions
at launch time. A YouTube PM, for instance, needs to be able to speak intelligently about video
streaming (at a high level, at least) to help drive decision-making and unblock engineering. Are you
able to understand technical concepts and explain them to non-engineers?
➢ Example question format: “Describe technology X to a five-year-old.”
➢ Video lessons for this category, including an interview tactics guide and examples of strong
answers (with our famous voiceover commentary) are included in the Flagship Google PM
Interview Course.

The unusual style of Craft & Execution questions

One unique aspect of Craft & Execution interviews is that they will usually focus on hypothetical
situations, as opposed to asking you about your past experiences. The idea is that your interviewer wants
to see the general patterns and rules of thumb you follow when tackling novel situations, instead of getting
bogged down in the details of a highly-specific situation that occurred in the past.

Because Google interviewers are allowed to create their own interview questions, you can still expect to
get some “tell me about a time…” questions, but not that many. You’ll be more likely to get questions that
start with phrases like “Suppose…” or “Imagine…”, or general questions like, “How do you handle X
situations?” or, “Do you prefer Y or Z type teams?”

This setup is quite unusual for PM interviews — especially for some of the more behavioral questions — so
be sure to prepare with hypothetical questions to avoid being surprised on interview day.

Using Product Alliance to prepare for Craft & Execution interviews

As we mentioned above, we’ve added and reorganized a large amount of content to create a brand-new
section on the Craft & Execution interviews in the Flagship Google PM Interview Course.

In the Craft & Execution Questions section, be sure to watch the videos in all the subsections:

❖ Prioritization & Tradeoffs

❖ Product Launch
❖ Crisis Response
❖ Teamwork and Collaboration

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 ❖ Technical Explainers

Also check out the Product Improvement subsection in the Product Questions section; that’s aimed at the
“Evolving your product” pillar of Craft & Execution.

The Craft & Execution section of the course also contains our database of Google Craft & Execution
questions, which includes dozens of all-new interview questions you can practice with. Like with all of our
interview question databases, we’ll update this database every month so you’ll always be able to practice
with the freshest questions.

If you’ve enrolled in other Flagship courses

The new and existing materials in the Flagship Google PM Interview Course should be plenty to help you
crack the Craft & Execution interview, but if you’d like to broaden your preparation even more, you may
find value in some of the materials in Product Alliance’s other Flagship PM Interview Courses. (If you
purchased the Full Library Access Pass, you have unlimited, lifetime access to all 9 Product Alliance
courses, including the 5 other Flagship courses, so you can freely browse all of them.)

Google’s Craft & Execution interview is starting to resemble Meta’s execution interview, which you can
learn about in the Flagship Meta PM Interview Course. Of course, the two companies’ interviews are still
different, and Meta execution interviews cover ground that Google’s Craft & Execution interviews typically
do not. Still, the tactics covered in The Secret Playbook for Mastering the Meta Execution Interview will help
you find more ways to approach questions in the “Prioritization, execution, and tradeoffs” bucket.

Amazon and Google are very different beasts, but Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy made some good points about
execution and product quality in their famous Leadership Principles. In the Flagship Amazon PM
Interview Course, you can learn some useful techniques for talking about maintaining a high quality bar,
executing quickly, working around constraints, and thinking-long term. Check out What Amazon’s Really
Looking For in Behavioral Interviews About Its Leadership Principles and The Biggest Mistakes Candidates
Make When Talking About Amazon’s Leadership Principles, and pay special attention to Leadership
Principles #3 (invent and simplify), #7 (insist on the highest standards), #9 (bias for action), and #10
(frugality).

If you haven’t enrolled in any other Product Alliance courses and would like to get access to this additional
content, just email team@productalliance.com and ask about upgrading to the Full Library Access Pass.

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Let us know what you learn in your Craft & Execution interviews
We’re always trying to improve the PM interview preparation materials available on Product Alliance, and
as part of that we regularly source information and updates from our current members. If you’re
interviewing at Google and get a Craft & Execution interview, email the questions you get asked to
team@productalliance.com to be entered into our raffle, where you can win one of ten $250 Amazon gift
cards each month.

Likewise, if you learn any more details about Craft & Execution interviews from your recruiters or
interviewers, feel free to let us know as well, and we’ll keep updating our content as we discover more
about this major change to Google PM interviews.

Thanks in advance for helping us make Product Alliance better for everyone!

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