I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Nov 2014
Interview
A recruiter reached out through LinkedIn. Was easy to work with and helped set me up with a phone screen. Phone screen was a short product design question about how I would design an app for my favorite sports team (I had the choice between this and another question not related to sports).
After passing the phone screen got passed to a new recruiter who helps with the rest of the process. Was brought on site for a day of being interviewed by 4 different PMs and 1 SWE. Mostly standard PM questions around product design and metrics. SWE had two parts: implementing a fibonacci algorithm, first naively and them optimizing (iterative vs. recursive, memoizing, etc...) and the a systems design question around implementing Google Instant.
I thought the interviews went well, but the still couldn't decide so they brought me in again for a second round of onsites. This time I only met with senior two people, a high-level SWE (had been at Google for 9 years) and a Director of PM. These went well and my final package was approved by the hiring committee about two weeks after the second round.
Throughout the interviews there were no brainteasers or estimation questions. The closest thing was the ladder question I included below, which is really more of a CS/algorithms question.
Overall the process took much longer than expected, about 3 months from initial contact to offer.
Google feels big and it is big. I also interviewed at Twitter and Facebook and the size differences jump up an order of magnitude for each step (Twitter -> FB -> Google). It also noticeably feels like an older company, i.e. interviewing with people who have been at Google since before FB or Twitter were founded. This isn't a bad thing, just an observation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have a ladder of N steps (rungs). You can go up the ladder by taking either 1 step or two steps at a time, in any combination. How many different routes are there (combinations of 1 steps or 2 steps) to make it up the ladder?
I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Apr 2014
Interview
Started out in a shabby fashion -- made me wait for a while. Didn't come across as very organized initially. After that multiple interviewers came by one after another in the same conference room that I was in. The best part of the interview was the lunch experience. Their follow-up was also slow.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
# of buses needed to transport Google employees between mountain view and bay area residences.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Oct 2014
Interview
Friend submitted my resume. Recruiter got in touch to set up a phone interview after a day. Had the first interview a couple weeks later. Had to ask for an update before I knew they wanted me to go through another phone interview a week after the first one. Had a second phone interview. Waited about 10 days, then reached out for feedback. Recruiter called me right away to let me know we were not moving forward.
Recruiter explained that in their experience, Product Mangers with a lot of business savvy, but without a technology background (which was very clearly not in my resume) don't last very long (more than two years) at Google. Her explanation for thinking I might be a good fit originally was with the hope that I had self-taught some technical/computer science skills. ...This all flies in the face of having asked this question of the first interviewer whose response was, "We don't need engineers for this role. Use what you're good at." The second interviewer was a computer science guy turned product person and arrogantly asked, "How do you expect to work with the top 1% of computer science engineers in the WORLD without any computer science background?" Left a very bad taste in my mouth. The recruiter thought I would be a good fit in other roles at Google and asked me to let her know what else I was interested in. I won't be applying again.
Yet another talented woman filtered out of Google.