Strategy question
Should Google offer a Stubhub competitor? That is, sell sports, concert, and theater tickets?
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Adjacent-market strategy judgment: can you weigh a new category against Google's actual strengths and the risk of entering a low-margin, operationally complex business.
How to approach it
- State the framework: market size, Google's right to win, and margin/operational complexity of ticketing.
- Market reality: ticketing (StubHub) is a large but thin-margin, fraud-prone business requiring deep venue/artist relationships built over years.
- Google's assets: massive search intent capture (people search 'concert tickets near me' on Google constantly) and Google Pay infrastructure.
- Key gap: Google lacks existing venue/promoter relationships and secondary-market inventory, the hardest part of this business to build from scratch.
- Propose a scoped alternative: rather than building a marketplace, deepen Google's role as a search/discovery aggregator (already partially true via 'Google presents tickets') and take a referral fee, avoiding inventory/fraud risk.
- Give a clear verdict: no to a full StubHub-style marketplace, yes to strengthening the existing aggregator/discovery role.
What a strong answer includes
- Correctly identifies venue/promoter relationships as the hard-to-replicate asset StubHub has that Google doesn't, which is the crux of the decision.
- Leverages Google's actual strength, search intent capture, for a lower-risk aggregator play instead of a full marketplace build.
- Flags fraud and thin margins as real operational risks in ticketing, showing category awareness.
- Gives a clear, reasoned no to full entry while proposing a smarter scoped alternative rather than a flat rejection.
Common mistakes
- Recommending a full marketplace launch without acknowledging the venue-relationship moat StubHub already has.
- Ignoring that Google already partially plays in this space via search results, and not building on that existing position.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you address fraud and fake ticket listings if Google entered this space?
- What would it take for Google to justify acquiring an existing player instead of building?
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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