I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Jul 2015
Interview
45 min over the phone. Followed by a day of interview at the headquarter in Mountain View. Lots of interaction with the recruiter.
Several questions - very little on my background. Mostly around 'How would you estimate/evaluate...'. Analytical questions, nothing particularly difficult.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
over the phone interview: how would you estimate the market size for 'rocket boots'?
Several standard PM questions when on site - off the book nothing that I was not prepared for, just standard ' how would you ...' questions. Did not strike me they were really interesting and well thought questions.
Throughout the entire process I could not get off my head the way the interviewer over the phone interacted with me. My phone interview latest 45 min. Right off, the interview did not properly introduced himself. He quickly said his name and nothing else. Engagement: 0%. He was on speaker phone and despite me mentioning there was a lot of noise/feedback in the room he did not even make an effort to eliminate it. He jumped right away into an analytical question. So here I am, 20+ experience in Prod mgmt, and I am being asked to evaluate the market size of 'rocket boots'. Great! I spoke at length about sizing and evaluations, how to narrow down the target using different techniques. He clearly was a very junior person, did not even know about analysts ( never heard of Gartner). Had no clue about Android vs IOS. During the discussion he would hang on peculiar details with honestly had no bearing on the overall conversation. His tone sounded somewhat arrogant.
In the last few minutes I was asked if I had any more questions, so I inquired about his reason for joining Google and what motivates him. He simply said ' because of the very good engineers' . Such a plain, vanilla, boring comment. Could have done much better and put a bit more effort into the conversation. On-site Interview were on and off. Some guys with big egos and some very nice people.
All in all, I did not feel Google was a good match. Pay is not that great and I would have never worked together with this guy in case I had to. I am sure there any many valuable people in the company. I must have gotten the rotten apple.
Very self-driven, first of multiple rounds, where I had to take the initiative to arrive at the problem, constraints, approach, solutions, tradeoffs and reasoning behind it in a matter of 30 minutes.
You would have to do a hiring assessment first, then a recruiter screening follows. First round interview with the hiring manager. Majorly product sense and product improvement. The questions were not direct though.
Overall a lot of steps to the interview process. Talked to different people and had opportunities to ask questions. Many different stages which made it a lengthy process overall. Wasn't too bad.