Let's try a fun one, actually. So a lot of people I talk to are very much intimidated by Google PM interviews. Because, so this might have started from the early days of Google where, as you know, Larry and Sergey were computer science PhDs from Stanford. And pretty much everyone that they hired had a computer science degree, including Marissa Meyer, who's very well known as the first female PM at Google. So engineering for sure is still very much within the Google lifeblood of being a PM. However, obviously, these days there are so many variants of product managers ranging from Google Maps to, let's say, Google Health where they're more healthcare focused, to Google AI where they're more data and maybe modeling focused. So you choose where there may be more growth or business or social focused, right? And then of course, there is Google Cloud Platform, GCP, where they're, in a way, more infrastructure or technical focused. So the level of technical depth in interview questions can really range across the board. So when I interviewed at Google, I actually got asked what happens when you enter in a URL into a browser and we went to a level of load balancing and DNS servers and entries. So it really ranges across the board. But let's say for Bob's example, let's give him a standard technical question, which is more around, can you grok technical concepts and can you be able to explain them to lay folks? So in a sense, can you explain the concept of a protocol to a four-year old child using the ice cream store as analogy? >> Okay. Okay, so in trying to describe a protocol to a four-year old using the ice cream store, the way I would describe it is that we're going to go into a place that has a lot of options to us. And what we do when we go in there is we need to take some time to think about what our decision is going to be. And then when we're ready, we have some other decisions to make in terms of how what we're going to do with that choice. For instance, if we're going to choose a particular type of ice cream, then we're going to choose a particular type of either cone or dish that's going to go in. And so in deciding that, we're going to go through the process of making decisions that become increasingly layered on top of each other. And then ultimately, when I make the order about what I want, then I'm going to do an exchange of some type of value for that. So for you, when we do that, the protocol here is we need to decide what we want to eat, then we need to decide what we're going to eat it in or with, and then we need to let the person know what we want. They're going to give it to us, and then we're going to give them something that they think is important or valuable to them in exchange for them giving us the ice cream in the dish or the cone that we want. And that's how we are going to get our ice cream at the store. >> Awesome, cool. I'm really actually happy that you were able to go through the entire example without using a single technical word. And often, for a lot of interview candidates, they do get caught up a lot in the details and they end up actually inserting different technical definitions, which is not really the point of these questions. So I thought that was really great, Bob. >> Maybe rounding it out with strategy question, what is a company that is doing bad marketing? And why? >> Okay. I think the way I would describe a company that's doing bad marketing is one that hasn't really aligned their message to the real customer they're selling to. I find a lot of times that when companies have a product that they haven't really figured out who's the real customer, they tend to homogenize their message. They tend to try and do a message that tries to reach everybody versus the target customer. So companies that tend to try and homogenize their messages and they're trying to reach the broadest mix of people without really understanding who their target customer is tend to flail. They tend to not be able to really go deep with a customer and really build a deep, loyal customer base, and then build out adjacencies to customers that might be sort of close to their ideal but not exactly their ideal. So I think, again, the first thing I think is just sort of not knowing your customer and not attenuating your efforts toward that. I think the second is when the message about what they're delivering to the customer doesn't have a clear benefit to them. But a customer can easily sort of identify and say, that's relevant to me, it matters to me, it's something that is important to something that's in my life or something that I want. And so when their messages aren't really clearly communicating a benefit in a way that's meaningful and tangible to the customer. I think the third that I would say would be a company that tends to live on bravado and grandiose statements that tend to, in some cases, not be believable, and can in some cases seem to be sort of over the top. And so therefore, customers sort of look at that and they look at it with sort of a skeptical eye and really don't build trust. So I think know your customer, be very clear about the benefit of the product, and build the right kind of trust so that the customer will be actually a return customer. I think that's it. In short, what I would say is really a bad set of marketing. And frankly, there are many companies out there that do that on a regular basis that we can sort of point to and say, wow, you can see how they had a great idea, but they just didn't dial it in exactly right and they went away pretty quickly. >> Can you give us an example? And let's actually leverage some of the advice that you had given previously into a specific company example. >> Yeah, I'm trying to think of a more recent one. I'm trying to think of a more recent one that would be a great example of that. I'm drawing a blank, Nancy. >> Or a historical one that maybe was actually widely known because of its lack of targeting customers and it went away to your point. >> I'm trying to pick one for you and I'm drawing a blank. Let's see here. I think there's one that was an epic fail. I'm sorry, Nancy. I'm drawing a blank. I don't have one for you.
