It was the longest interview process I have been thru. Took 3 months for them to say no. I was really interested in cloud but the interview panel was a bunch of PMs with 2-4 years experience in very consumer centric areas - one guy was the PM for payments risk, another one was PM for Google Play store monetization, the senior most of them was PM for Google shopping. I asked him the difference between the job of a PM and a GPM at Google. He gave a pretty elaborate reply - hopefully he did not take it in a bad way and give me a bad review! The technical interviewer was by far the smartest guy. I get the feeling that Google's hiring process has created a very uniform set of people who walk and talk very similar things and are in a bubble. Google is no where on the scene when it comes to messaging, social networking, etc. Even in digital ads, small companies like Branch.io have come up with very innovative ideas. Clearly these PMs are not really that earth shattering and lack originality. My interview feedback, however, was not positive - the first hiring manager balked. I am a pretty honest and brutal judge of myself and was feeling good about the interview - I was quite surprised. The recruiter then decided to share my resume with the cloud teams as thats what I was really interested in. Turned out a bunch of PM managers in the cloud were interested. I spoke with a few and 2 managers were really interested and sponsored my case to the hiring committee. Based on the feedback from the earlier interviews, however, I was rejected. In places like AWS, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. hiring managers have an important say in the hiring process. There is no data to suggest that these companies are doing badly because of that. Google , on the other hand, is not really doing any different in terms of innovation because of its strange hiring practices. It is lagging behind in terms of market share in many areas that it has stepped into - that is a direct indication of how its Product Managers are performing.