A Secret About Google’s Product Culture
A couple of months ago, after a thrilling two year run, I stepped away from product at Google Cloud to return to climate tech. Coming to Google in the first place was a dream for me. Since I first decided to become a Product Manager (PM), I’d worshiped Google for its supremacy in establishing a product culture that produces simple, delightful products that were just better, from Search and Chrome to Android and Workspace. I was humbled, and a little dazed, to join the club of legendary PMs headlined by names like Justin Rosenstein (Asana Founder) and Harry Glaser (Periscope Founder).
In those anxious weeks before joining, I was overcome by curiosity to uncover what enhancers were infused in the product waters at Google. What essential element empowered my product heroes and their professional kin to ship great products that changed the world?
On the other side now, I’ve found my answer: Google elevates its product managers as de facto product leaders.
That’s a remarkable thing! After all, Google is first and foremost a technology company not a product company. You need only rewatch Google IO 2022 and listen for the number of times Googlers mentioned “AI” to be reminded of that. It would be reasonable to think that such a company would elevate their engineers above their product managers. When you have the best engineers in the world, it would be reasonable for company leaders to give in to the temptation of unleashing them to build whatever they want to and have product managers scramble behind assembling together product packaging around their code.
What I saw was quite the opposite: I was stunned at how quick engineering managers were to coach their engineering teams to seek product input before clacking away at their keyboards.
Once I was inside, I saw how Google elevated its PMs everywhere. I saw it in the access to tools, data, users, and customers that PMs were given. I saw it when PMs interacted with engineering directors, account managers, designers, and executives. I saw it during strategy workshops, OKR planning, and in launch approvals. I even saw it with who was promoted to executive leadership: Sundar Pichai PMed Chrome and Marissa Mayer was Google’s first PM. When I prepared our product team’s first prioritized roadmap in Month 2 on the job, I remember being taken aback at how ready my engineering manager was to let me lead.
That’s not to say I didn’t have to work to maintain that influence every day. I, like every other diligent PM at Google, invested in status-building from the jump. As the PM for Cloud SQL for MySQL, in my two weeks of the job I read O’Reilly’s Learning MySQL, I wrote a friction log for the product onboarding experience, and I met with more than a dozen people in our sales team to demonstrate that I had the technical proficiency, product familiarity, and customer awareness that my team needed me to have when making big decisions.
The difference though at Google was that I wasn’t doing those things to make a case for why I should have product influence — I already had it from day one on the job.
We PMs, perhaps more than any other professional discipline, can only be as successful as our company’s culture allows us to be. No one reports to us! No PM has ever gotten their way by carrying a big stick. We PMs lead by status, not power. At the end of the day, if I had been working with engineers that had been acculturated to override product guidance, or to turn to leadership for product decisions, I’d have never been effective no matter how capable I was.