Google is a big company, and there is a lot of variance between teams. I don't think this is a great generalization. I have only worked in one small area, but

Google is a big company, and there is a lot of variance between teams. I don't think this is a great generalization. I have only worked in one small area, but my intuition is that if you end up doing something that's very much a part of the public face of the company (say, a flagship mobile app), your experience will probably be similar to other product-driven app companies, where there are people who specialize in making product decisions and people who specialize in implementation. Whereas if you're down in the bowels of the infrastructure for transforming protobufs into cat videos, you may never meet a product manager for your whole career.