Product Sense: How YouTube Could Better Serve Live Music Fans
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 YouTube for people who love concerts. Decide which concert fans you would build for, what frustrates them today, what YouTube should ship first for them, and how you would tell whether it worked.
```hint Follow the fan around a show
A concert is more than the performance itself. Walk through what a fan does before, during and after a show they care about, and look for the moments where YouTube is missing or does the job badly today.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Should this be a set of features inside the main YouTube app, or a separate product dedicated to live music?
- Which concert experiences are in scope: watching full recorded shows, watching live streams of shows the fan cannot attend, or supporting fans who go in person?
- Is the main aim more engaged viewing, new revenue such as paid live streams or ticket referrals, or a stronger relationship with artists and labels?
- Do artists, promoters and venues who publish concert video count as users of this design, or only the fans?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that explains why concerts matter to YouTube, tied to viewing, music subscriptions and its relationships with the music industry.
- A segmentation of concert fans, and of the artist side that supplies concert video, with a reasoned choice of one primary segment.
- Pain points along that segment's concert journey mapped to features that use YouTube's strengths, prioritized into a focused first version.
- A plan for the supply side: music rights, artist consent and the incentives that decide whether concert video exists and stays up.
- Success metrics with guardrails, and the main risks such as rights disputes, poor-quality fan footage and live-stream failures.
### Follow-up Questions
- Much of the concert footage on YouTube is phone video that fans upload without the artist's permission. How should your design treat it?
- If the first release could include only one feature, which would you keep and why?
- How would you choose between charging for live concert streams and keeping them free with ads?
Overview: A Google product sense question asking how YouTube should be designed for people who love concerts. It tests choosing a fan segment, mapping pain points around live and recorded shows, prioritizing a first release, handling music rights and artist incentives, and defining success metrics with guardrails.