Strategy question
Suppose a customer is considering switching from Azure to Google Cloud. What are 5-7 key pieces of information (metrics, policies, etc.) about Google Cloud you would want to show them?
- Strategy
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests the ability to build a customer-facing competitive narrative: picking the handful of facts that actually move a buying decision, not a full feature list.
How to approach it
- Clarify the customer profile: company size, current Azure workloads, and the trigger for considering a switch (cost, performance, lock-in).
- Pick metrics buyers care about: total cost of ownership versus Azure, compute and storage pricing, and committed-use discounts.
- Include migration-specific facts: data transfer and migration tooling, and interoperability with existing tools like Kubernetes.
- Include policy and trust items: data residency, compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO), and SLA uptime guarantees.
- Include a differentiator: Google's networking backbone and BigQuery or AI or ML tooling if the workload is data-heavy.
- Prioritize the 5 to 7 items by what would most reduce this specific customer's perceived risk of switching.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the list in the customer's likely reason for evaluating a switch, such as cost overruns or a data and analytics need, rather than a generic feature dump.
- Includes concrete comparison points, for example estimated compute cost savings (illustrative, as an assumption, such as 10 to 20 percent) alongside qualitative items like committed-use discounts.
- Addresses switching risk directly: migration tooling, data residency, and SLA guarantees, since fear of lock-in and downtime is the biggest blocker.
- Ends with a clear next step, such as a proof-of-concept workload migration to de-risk the decision.
Common mistakes
- Listing 15 generic Google Cloud features instead of the 5 to 7 that matter to this buyer.
- Ignoring the emotional and risk side of switching clouds, such as fear of downtime or vendor lock-in.
Likely follow-up questions
- Which of these 5 to 7 items would you lead with in the first conversation, and why?
- How would you handle a customer whose main blocker is internal team familiarity with Azure rather than cost?
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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