Strategy question
How would you increase YouTube's daily active users?
- Strategy
- Medium
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What this question tests
Growth strategy: identifying the right lever (acquisition, activation, retention) for a mature platform's DAU.
How to approach it
- Clarify what's limiting DAU today: is it new user acquisition, weak activation, or existing users churning, since the lever differs for each.
- Consider acquisition levers: international expansion in underpenetrated markets and creator-side incentives to bring new audiences.
- Consider activation levers: improving the new-user recommendation quality (cold start problem) so first sessions hook people faster.
- Consider retention levers: notification relevance and content freshness for lapsed users, like a personalized 're-engagement' push.
- Recommend prioritizing the biggest funnel leak first, e.g. if activation is weak, cold-start recommendations beat acquisition spend.
- Define success metrics: DAU/MAU ratio as a guardrail so growth isn't just adding low-engagement users.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly asks where the biggest funnel leak is before picking a lever, rather than assuming acquisition is the answer.
- Proposes a concrete cold-start fix, like using signup context (subscriptions, search history) to seed better first-session recommendations.
- Gives an illustrative metric, e.g. improving day-1 session length by 15% via better cold-start recs, marked as an assumption.
- Sets DAU/MAU as a guardrail, so raw DAU growth via low-quality users doesn't count as success.
Common mistakes
- Defaulting to 'more marketing spend' without diagnosing where users are actually being lost.
- Ignoring retention of existing lapsed users in favor of only chasing new ones.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you know if the issue is acquisition or retention?
- What would you do differently for a market with high internet cost sensitivity?
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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