Designing a Daily Business Metrics Dashboard for a Product of Your Choice
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
As a product manager, choose a product you know and like, then decide what belongs on the dashboard you would review every day to run that product as a business. Name the product and explain how it creates value and makes money, list the metrics you would put on the dashboard and why each one earns its place, and show how you would use the dashboard to spot problems and act on them.
```hint Daily means actionable today
For every metric you consider, ask two things: does it change meaningfully from one day to the next, and would a change in it make you do something today? Metrics that only move over months belong in a different report.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- May I pick a product from any company, or should it be one of Google's products?
- Who reads this dashboard each day: me and my product team, or company leadership?
- Does "running the business" include revenue and cost, or mainly usage and product health?
- Should the dashboard cover the whole product or one line of business within it?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clearly stated product, its user groups and its business model, which together determine what the dashboard must show.
- A short metric hierarchy: one primary metric, the input metrics that drive it, monetization, and quality or trust guardrails, covering every side of the product.
- Design choices specific to a daily view: comparisons with the same weekday, alert thresholds, segment drill-downs, data freshness, and a deliberate list of what is left off.
- How each metric leads to a decision or an owner, shown with a concrete example of reading the dashboard.
### Follow-up Questions
- One morning the top-line usage tile is sharply down compared with the same day last week. What do you check first, and in what order?
- Leadership will let you keep only three tiles. Which three, and why?
- How would this daily dashboard differ from the one you bring to a quarterly business review?
Overview: A Google product manager interview question asking candidates to pick a product they like and define the dashboard they would check every day to run it as a business. It tests metric selection, a metric hierarchy spanning users, supply and revenue, guardrails, and turning daily signals into action.