Product Manager Portfolio
Back to questions

If you are a Chief Product Officer for YouTube, how would you explain the product to someone? What are the top three metrics you would keep track of?

An actual interview question from a top e-commerce marketplace company  for a senior product role
  • Related to Product Strategy
  • For Generalist PM
  Amazon
Add Your Answer
Answers (2)

If I were the Chief Product Officer for YouTube, I would explain the product as a leading online platform for video sharing and content consumption. It provides users with a vast library of videos across various genres, allowing them to discover, watch, and engage with content creators from around the world. The top three metrics I would keep track of are user engagement, retention rate, and revenue generation.

User Engagement would indicate how actively users interact with the platform through metrics like time spent on site, number of videos watched per session, and comments/likes/shares.

The Retention Rate would measure the percentage of users who continue to use the platform over a set period, indicating the platform’s ability to keep users engaged and connected.

Finally, Revenue Generation is crucial to analyze the platform’s financial health and growth potential, including metrics such as ad revenue, subscriptions, and partnerships.

By monitoring these metrics, YouTube can gain insights into user satisfaction, identify areas for improvement, and optimize revenue streams to ensure its success as the leading video-sharing platform.

 

Interviewee:  Define “someone”. Since most of the internet users know what YouTube is, should I pick one of these?

  • Someone older who has not heard YouTube
  • Somone younger – 5 year old?
Interviewer:  Either, You pick!
Interviewee:  I’ll pick someone who is older that who has not heard what YouTube is and is not tech or internet savvy.
Since the opposite party isn’t tech or internet savvy and most likely aware of TV or Radio I’ll use this as an analogy to draw parallels.
So here you go:  I’m the head of the department in a company called YouTube that helps anyone create a video and share it with anyone in the world.  Just like how TV or a Radio needs a signal,  YouTube needs internet and anyone who has internet can use their phone, TV or computer to connect to it and watch videos. As a matter of fact, 80% of the total internet users use YouTube and every day over 1 Billion hours of videos are watched through out the world using our product  (I would have used platform but product is more relatable to this demographics)
Top 3 Metrics
As a head of the department, my goal is to make sure (I’ll try to put this in layman term)
  • Total number of hours viewed per day (Daily Viewing Hours)
  • Number of users who create and view content are growing
    • This includes how many new users are coming in to our product (Basically Unique users on Daily and Monthly)
  • Total number of hours streaming per user  (Session Length)
    • This will help me understand if the users are actually liking our product or not (User Engagement)
In summary,  as a head of product, my goal is to make sure that more and more users are using our product and the existing users are consuming more content.