7 ms·

I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then

• JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.
  • sincerely 8y ago
    Project Manager
  • luhn 8y ago
    Project manager. Pretty standard role in a software team. The person who determines what the end result should look like.
    • Uberphallus 8y ago
      It can be Product Manager too. Product Manager has more of a focus on customer/marketing, whereas Project Manager oversees the technical teams implementing Product Manager's ideas. A Product Manager doesn't need to have a technical background, but a Project Manager should.
    • gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
      From context it is a Product Manager. Project Manager: manages day-to-day running for project e.g. fighting for the right number of devs, designers etc Product Manager: (also product owner) determines what the product should look like.
    • otabdeveloper1 8y ago
      > The person who determines what the end result should look like. Not necessarily. In many companies 'project manager' is just the techie name of what used to be called a 'secretary'.
  • disiplus 8y ago
    project manager
  • askl56 8y ago
    Not OP but I assume project managers
  • visarga 8y ago
    Could also be Product Manager.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • Cookingboy 8y ago
    Product Manager.
  • otabdeveloper1 8y ago
    > focusing on making actual useful products A 'product' is something you sell to clients. Google's only product is advertising, and they don't need to focus on making better advertising because they are a monopoly. Everything else Google does is just a smokescreen for investors and a creeping fear that they won't be able to exist in a post-monopoly world.
    • davidwihl 8y ago
      Google also sells hardware (phones, Nest), Cloud services, gSuite...Ads represent 80-85% of Google revenue but that share is decreasing over time.
      • superflyguy 8y ago
        Google barely sells phones. They might have done with Nexus but they sell as many Pixels in a year as Apple do in 3 days. I know no-one with a Nest. They're still very much an ad company.
    • derefr 8y ago
      Aren’t most Google services there to capture eyeballs for the advertisers to service? That’s Google Search (sponsored results), YouTube, and—in some sense—Chrome.
    • beagle3 8y ago
      > Google's only product is advertising, Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising. Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...) etc. AFAIK, G-Suite for business is actually making money (a round-off error compared to advertising, but still, a profitable business), and the various cloud storage and compute offering are actually making money that is not a round-off error (though still dwarfed by advertising). Also, they DO need to make better advertising (and farm better attention), because they are in many ways a "natural monopoly" - they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour (which they have practiced at times, especially with YouTube, but not nearly to the extent practiced by any other player of this size).
  • skocznymroczny 8y ago
    I believe PM is for Project Manager
    • flarg 8y ago
      Product manager
  • ewjordan 8y ago
    PM is a super heavily overloaded term that you'll run across in pretty much any company larger than small, definitely not specific to Google (disclaimer: I work at Google and don't speak for the company, but I'm brand new so my conception of the categories comes from what I've seen elsewhere). Engineers tend to raise an eyebrow at the entire job category because they're thinking of bad experiences with one particular flavor of PM (and often a particularly poor specimen at that), but that can be unfair, a lot of what they do is absolutely critical to business. The acronym simply means either product manager, project manager, or program manager, but the responsibilities can be any/all of the following, and probably more, depending on the company: - Full product owner, "the buck stops here" person. Many different possible titles here other than PM (usually "project manager" if that's the title), like general manager (GM), different flavors of producer, product owner (PO), VP of X, etc. - Feature designer/owner/manager (product manager): writing specs (junior), pitching specs (mid-level), setting and selling product vision (senior), driving strategy (staff/exec, though at that level all roles start to get blurry). Decent business school grad representation here, you have to be good at strategy, negotiation, communication, and Powerpoint; having good product ideas helps a lot, too, but not if you can't sell them. A persuasive PM of this type is a force to be reckoned with and will get a lot of executive attention, which can be very good or very bad depending on whether the strategy they're into pans out or not. This is probably the type of PM the parent was talking about "armies of". - Development director (project manager or program manager): a whip-cracker at worst or an impenetrable shitshield at best, they manage the practicalities of running a project, like project scoping, meeting and managing hard/soft deadlines, handling support, cross-team communications, processes, compliance, etc., often stepping in as an all-purpose guard against randomization so that others can focus on producing the product. Many PMs of this type ended up being the go-to folks for GDPR compliance over the past couple years, so it's not just internal process stuff that they deal with. - Task checker: can blend into to the development director mentioned above, but at some companies this sort of PM will mainly focus on tracking tasks that are in-progress, getting estimates, watching velocity, and sending reports up the chain. Some devs find this role pointless and annoying, but it really depends on how good they are - if they're solid, they'll find a lot of ways to improve things instead of just tracking them. - Scrum Master (project manager): Big-S Scrum is falling out of favor so it's not as fashionable to have this title anymore, but within some processes a similar role still exists as a type of project manager. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple yet effective "People Over Process" process that consists of a bi-weekly no-laptops-allowed retrospective meeting where you get the team together to have a free-ranging discussion where everyone feels heard, so that you can all decide together whether the team should estimate engineering tasks in terms of hours or hats. You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats. A more seasoned Scrum Master will also schedule a quarterly retrospective-retrospective where the team discusses a strategy for what guidelines to put in place for the next retrospective so that the team can decide on hats faster and leave more time for the less settled question about whether or not the Fibonacci sequence is the right way to count hats or if a size-based approach will make people feel better supported in their work. - Monetization designer (product manager): mainly at game companies, PM is often a super different role, probably best described as the profitability-focused counterpart to a game designer. They focus on setting prices, managing game economies, speccing and evaluating A/B tests, inventing loot boxes, etc. Ideally PM and designer would be one and the same, and the game design would be holistic with the monetization, with a designer that has serious Excel/analytics chops and deep inspiration and sensitivity about gameplay, but that's a more rare combination than you'd think, so a lot of companies split them out. I'm probably missing some other ways this acronym is overloaded, but I think this covers most of it.
• sifusam 8y ago
  I've experienced this politicking time and time again. Ultimately these decisions kill great products and drive customers away.
• jhall1468 8y ago
  For the record, project managers aren't the problem. Google having no clue how to hire good product managers is the problem. This is why Amazon doesn't have problems like this, our PM's really are world class. But our obsession with mid-level managers is getting out of hand, so I suppose we're all headed in the same direction.
  • gcb0 8y ago
    that's how it starts. first the middle managers, then good engineers leave because of said middle managers. then middle managers hire troves of contractors to justify their jobs. then contractors who knows where the bodies are buried become the new engineers. and then you have a Google.
• unixhero 8y ago
  This is a great behind the scenes view. What is Social? Is that at major product vertical within Google? "Possibly" is a potential good answer here :).
  • Cookingboy 8y ago
    Social was the department that was running Google+ and Hangout, and at one point I think Youtube fell under its control as well? Vic Gundotra was the SVP who ran it. Despite my mixed feelings toward products from Social I had a lot of respect for Vic.
    • vtesucks 8y ago
      Vic Gundotra was a turkey trying to be an eagle with this stupid twitter commentary.
      • twig_w 8y ago
        haha, i like your figure of speech.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • iainmerrick 8y ago
      Can you expand on that? I feel like many people are negative about Vic G so I’m curious about what positive points you might see.
  • nailer 8y ago
    Social needed features for G+ and success in social was seen as important (everyone's bonus was tied to it). So Hangouts became a G+ headline feature despite having very little to do with social.
  • cmrdporcupine 8y ago
    G+. The slogan at the time was "one unified Google" -- to I think rightfully correct a mistake that Google had a very diverse set of products many of which did not properly interact. As I understand it, GChat wasn't seen seen as able to integrate well into G+. So Hangouts was built on the G+/social infrastructure. To that team's credit they did somewhat seamlessly move users over from GChat to Hangouts without many hiccups. Of course, after the G+ effort disintegrated... we got Allo & Duo
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy". I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force some really bad design decisions that will quite possibly kill the company in a year or so. Got me thinking what it must be like at scale.
  • lowercased 8y ago
    > This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy". Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.
    • platz 8y ago
      So basically Google is like microsoft? https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2013/07/11/microsoft-reorganziation-tries-again-to-point-all-its-guns-outside-the-company/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/readwrite.com/2013/07/11/micros...
    • erentz 8y ago
      That was Microsoft before its transition over the past few years. Essentially every single product it’s own vertical with nothing shared, this went right down to having separate switches and server racks managed by separate people. It’s quite an amazing transformation Microsoft has gone through, never complete of course, but still impressive.
• auiya 8y ago
  This happens in every company that employs the Vitality Curve method for employee performance metrics. It ensures only highly visible projects are incentivized, regardless of their actual value added. You are promoted under such systems by merely paying lip service to your manager's assignments, and instead spending your time creating some widget, and exaggerating its usefulness non-stop until someone in upper management buys into your self-promotional hype. "I don't care if the world doesn't need this, it's going on my OKR's dammit!" Your product is green-lighted, and you get a promo. Then your product is pulled some years later futher pissing off your users. Try to operate in an environment like this without affecting the morale of your colleagues though. Go ahead, I'll watch. After dealing with such systems for over a decade I've learned I don't actually enjoy playing Game of Thrones every quarter with my co-workers.