Personalizing a Streaming Service's Home Page: Choosing Rows and Titles
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager of a video streaming service. Explain how you would decide what content appears on the service's landing page: who the page is for, what it should achieve, how you would choose and order what it shows, and how you would know your choices are working.
```hint One page, several audiences
A signed-out visitor, a member who joined yesterday and someone who watches every night need very different things from the same page. Settle the page's job for each of them before choosing rows or titles.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is this a subscription service with a catalog of licensed and original shows and films, or a platform where users upload their own videos?
- Should the answer cover signed-out visitors, signed-in members, or both?
- Which devices matter most: TV apps, mobile or web? A TV home screen browsed with a remote fits far fewer titles than a web page.
- What does the business most want from the page: sign-ups, member retention, ad revenue, or promotion of its own original titles?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- The landing page's goal for each audience, and a primary metric that reflects satisfying viewing rather than clicks.
- Segmentation of visitors (signed out, new member, regular member, member returning after a break) with a content approach for each.
- How candidate titles are gathered, how rows are chosen and ordered, and how relevance is balanced against discovery and freshness.
- Business and editorial constraints such as original titles, licensing windows, regional rights and maturity settings.
- How the page is evaluated offline and in experiments, with guardrails against repetition and short-term optimization.
### Follow-up Questions
- Leadership wants a full-width banner for a new original title on every member's home page. How do you decide who sees it?
- One account is shared by several people with different tastes, all on one profile. How does the page cope?
- Members say the home page shows the same titles every day. How would you measure that and fix it?
Overview: Decide what a video streaming service should show on its landing page for signed-out visitors, new members and regular viewers. The prompt tests audience segmentation, how rows and titles are chosen and ranked, balancing relevance with discovery and business priorities, and measuring the page with experiments and guardrails.