Strategy question
Should Google acquire Quora?
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What this question tests
Tests strategic M&A reasoning, weighing strategic fit and integration cost against simply building the capability in-house.
How to approach it
- Assess Quora's asset: a large corpus of question-and-answer content and community, valuable as structured knowledge for Google Search.
- Assess overlap: Google already surfaces People Also Ask and Search snippets, arguably already capturing much of the value Quora content provides.
- Weigh the acquisition cost and integration risk against building similar Q&A knowledge extraction from public web content Google already crawls.
- Consider antitrust exposure, since Google acquiring a content and community property invites additional regulatory scrutiny.
- Recommend against acquisition; instead, deepen People Also Ask and structured snippets using data Google already has access to, avoiding cost and antitrust risk.
What a strong answer includes
- Weighs the acquisition against an in-house build-alternative, showing awareness that buying isn't the only path to the same value.
- Explicitly raises antitrust risk, a real and relevant constraint for Google in 2024.
- Ties the recommendation to what Google already has, People Also Ask, rather than treating this as a novel need.
Common mistakes
- Saying yes to an acquisition just because the content looks valuable, without weighing cost or antitrust risk.
- Ignoring that Google likely already captures much of this value through existing Search features.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would change your recommendation if Quora were losing significant traffic?
- How would you value Quora's community versus just its content?
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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