Building and Scaling a Google Local Delivery Service Across Europe
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Google, and you have been asked to design a home delivery service that Google would run and then grow across Europe. Decide what the service delivers and who it is for, design the core experience for customers and for the businesses supplying the goods, and explain how you would launch it, expand it from country to country, and measure whether it is working.
```hint Pick a role Google can win
Delivery in Europe is crowded, and labor rules, languages, payment habits and city layouts change from country to country. Settle what Google's part in the service is, and where its existing products give it an advantage, before you design features or a rollout.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What should the service deliver: restaurant meals, groceries and household goods, parcels from online shops, or a mix?
- Should Google employ or contract its own couriers, or act as the ordering, payment and tracking layer on top of merchants and existing delivery companies?
- Is the main aim revenue from delivery itself, or more use of Google products such as Search, Maps and Google Pay?
- Does the first launch cover one city, one country, or several countries at once?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear scope for "home delivery," Google's role in it, and a goal tied to Google's strengths and business model.
- A chosen customer segment, plus the merchant and courier sides, with pain points mapped to a focused first version.
- A launch and expansion plan for Europe that accounts for differences in regulation, courier employment rules, languages, payment methods and city density.
- Success metrics, unit economics that gate each expansion step, and guardrails.
- Risks such as entrenched competitors, competition rules for large platforms, privacy and merchant trust.
### Follow-up Questions
- The first city has strong demand, but every order loses money. Which levers do you pull before expanding further?
- How would European competition rules for large platforms limit how Google promotes its own delivery service inside Search and Maps?
- How would you choose the second country?
- Suppose the interviewer fixes the scope up front and asks for a Google food delivery product for restaurant meals only. What changes in your scope, segment choice, economics and rollout?
Overview: Design a home delivery service that Google could offer and plan how it grows across Europe. The prompt tests scoping what is delivered and for whom, defining Google's role versus merchants and courier partners, sequencing country launches around local rules and payments, and setting metrics and unit-economics gates.