Strategy question
Should Google get into the ride-sharing market?
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests strategic market-entry judgment: weighing an adjacent market opportunity against existing assets, competitive intensity, and business-model fit.
How to approach it
- Take a clear position: state yes or no on entry, grounded in Google's existing assets and the maturity of the ride-sharing market.
- Assess Google's relevant assets: Google Maps' real-time traffic and routing data, Waymo's self-driving technology, and Android's device reach.
- Assess the competitive landscape: Uber and Lyft are entrenched with strong driver and rider network effects, making direct human-driven entry costly and low-margin.
- Propose the real opportunity: focus Google's advantage on autonomous ride-hailing via Waymo, a category where incumbents don't yet have a durable edge.
- Address business-model fit: ride-hailing is low-margin and operationally intensive, a mismatch for Google's high-margin ad and software business, unless autonomy changes the economics.
- Define success: Waymo service area expansion and rides-per-day growth, rather than market share in traditional ride-hailing.
What a strong answer includes
- Takes a clear, defensible position instead of listing pros and cons with no conclusion.
- Distinguishes competing in today's human-driven ride-hailing, a bad bet, from autonomous ride-hailing, a real opportunity.
- Grounds the recommendation in Google's actual assets, Maps data and Waymo, rather than a generic answer.
- Explicitly addresses business-model fit, noting ride-hailing's low margins versus Google's core high-margin business.
Common mistakes
- Giving a vague it-depends answer with no clear recommendation.
- Proposing to compete head-on with Uber and Lyft in traditional ride-hailing without acknowledging their entrenched network effects.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would Waymo's unit economics need to improve to justify a full-scale launch?
- What would be the biggest risk to Google's brand in entering this market?
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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