Strategy question
Due to COVID-19, Google Cloud Services demand has increased. Extrapolating current trends, we will reach the limit in 18 months. How will you handle it?
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Capacity planning strategy, balancing infrastructure investment lead time against demand growth and cost.
How to approach it
- Clarify the constraint, physical data center capacity, network bandwidth, or specific compute types like GPUs.
- Validate the extrapolation, check whether current demand growth is a durable trend or a temporary COVID spike before committing capital.
- Model options, build new capacity, optimize existing utilization, or manage demand through pricing and quotas.
- Propose a phased plan, start optimizing existing utilization and pricing now, since new data centers take longer than 18 months to build.
- Consider demand-side levers, tiered pricing or priority access for committed customers to smooth demand during a shortage.
- Define success metrics, capacity utilization rate and customer-facing availability or wait times during the transition.
What a strong answer includes
- Questions the trend first, since COVID-driven demand may not be durable, before committing to expensive new capacity.
- Separates supply-side fixes, new data centers, from demand-side fixes, pricing and quotas, since 18 months may not be enough lead time for new builds.
- Proposes an interim mitigation, like utilization optimization and committed-use pricing, to bridge the gap while capacity is built.
- Sets a concrete tracking metric, e.g. weekly utilization rate against forecast, to catch a wrong trend assumption early.
Common mistakes
- Assuming the current growth trend is permanent without validating it.
- Proposing only a supply-side fix and ignoring demand management levers.
- Not acknowledging that data center builds often take longer than 18 months.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the trend reverses after you have already invested.
- How would you prioritize which customers get capacity if there is a shortfall.
- How would you validate the demand forecast.
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop