I've been at Google coming on 12 years, and I'm a great PM I swear, but sometimes I wonder if the biggest value I provide to Google is having friends everywhere so it's easy to skip through the bureaucracy and get stuff done at scale
Chris Perry
1,957 posts
Chris Perry
@thechrisperry
SF Bay Area
Joined April 2009
- Google is standardizing interview questions (finally?) so I am forced to retire my bootleg interview questions. In honor of the great service they've done over 200+ PM interviews, I'm going to do a thread that I expect no one to read but I have no other way to memorialize them.
- Replying to @thechrisperry"Describe a product you worked on that didn't succeed as you hoped"
- Replying to @thechrisperryThis is my favorite ice breaker question - for reasons I don't understand at all, almost nobody comes prepared to talk about setbacks. I love having a moment to see how the candidate introspects and how much they learn from the past. 10/10 recommend this to a friend.
- Replying to @thechrisperry3) the enlightened, who can talk about failures openly, lessons learned, and how they are addressing those going forward. 10/10 I love this.
- Replying to @thechrisperry"Design the user interface of a time machine"
- Replying to @thechrisperryOh, and a big thanks to everyone who has interviewed with me over the years! I always start every interview telling the candidate I want them to succeed and have the best interview they possibly can, and I mean it!
- The surprising thing about tech leadership I've observed is just using the product automatically puts you in the top 10% of leaders. One of the craziest cheat codes.
- Replying to @thechrisperryAnd I'm always surprised that maybe 50% of people don't realize without prompting that Google doesn't just buy an empty 15gb hard drive every time someone signs up…
- Replying to @thechrisperryBut the real answer hinges on what the candidate wants to use the machine for? Is it for learning about the past? Time/date selector is like the worst design option. A lot of these design explorations end up looking more like a discover/explore feed.
- Replying to @thechrisperryPeople mostly break three different ways - 1) the deniers, who describe a failure that's really a success in disguise, 2) the shallow, who can describe a setback but don't have good ideas what happened, and
- Replying to @thechrisperryThis one is quirky and I love it, and I bet I get some hate for this, but it's a great question because you immediately weed out surface-level thinkers: every one of them designs a delorean every time. I freaking love it. Input time/date and boom that's it, what more could it be?
- Replying to @thechrisperryOkay I need to go back to work. I have a bunch of other less fun questions, but here I mourn the passing of my favorites. At least until I quit and do my own thing, and some future prospective employee digs this up and is super prepared for our interview ;)