Google Storytime: Building a User Focused Culture

Did you know that you can submit user feedback within any Google product? Google Meet has “Report a problem”, which allows you to send a screenshot and a text description to the engineering team. Wonder what happens behind the curtains? I will tell you all about it.

Besides creating Google Meet itself, the feedback tooling/system was probably my most satisfying technical contribution. We call this feedback tooling/system Doctor Thor. Thor was the codename for Meet, and Doctor Thor lets us diagnose the patient.

Doctor Thor was co-created by me and a teammate who we will once again call Jay. While I was the ideas/manager guy, he was the muscle/technical guy. This project was part of his well deserved promotion to L6 Staff Software Engineer.

Warning: This is a long and slightly technical article. If you are still interested in the details, read on.

PSA: For the Googlers on Blind who implied I was focused on shiny science fair projects instead of users, I hope you take the time to read this article.

Origins

In mid 2016, Google Meet was ready to go Open Beta, which means select Google Cloud customers under NDA can start using it. I wanted to know what kind of problems they were having, so I decided to delve into user feedback.