Strategy question
Should Google Maps enter into all aspects of restaurant business/domain (beyond just search)
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Strategic judgment on adjacent market expansion, weighing core competency against execution risk.
How to approach it
- Clarify the strategic question: expanding from search and discovery into owning the restaurant transaction (reservations, ordering, payments).
- Assess Google's advantage: massive search and location data, but limited experience operating transactional restaurant infrastructure directly.
- Evaluate competitive landscape: OpenTable, Resy, and delivery apps already own reservation and ordering relationships with restaurants.
- Weigh build versus partner: partnering or deepening integrations (like Reserve with Google) likely captures value with less execution risk than building full transaction infrastructure.
- Recommend a measured expansion: deepen data and discovery integrations with existing players rather than fully entering restaurant operations.
- Define success metrics: reservation and order completion rate through Google surfaces, and restaurant partner adoption.
What a strong answer includes
- Distinguishes 'owning discovery' (Google's strength) from 'owning transactions' (a genuinely different, harder business), which many candidates conflate.
- Names real competitors, OpenTable and delivery apps, showing awareness of the existing competitive landscape.
- Recommends a partnership-first path as lower-risk, with an illustrative goal like doubling reservation completions through Google Search in a year, marked as an assumption.
- Flags restaurant relationship management as a genuinely new operational capability Google would need to build or acquire.
Common mistakes
- Recommending full vertical expansion without weighing the operational complexity of running restaurant transactions.
- Ignoring existing entrenched competitors in reservations and food ordering.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide between partnering and building this in-house?
- What would make you recommend against this expansion entirely?
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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