As an ex-Googler, I disagree with this second-hand account. Yeah, political infighting sometimes happens and things get shook up, but this person paints the pic

As an ex-Googler, I disagree with this second-hand account. Yeah, political infighting sometimes happens and things get shook up, but this person paints the picture of no project ever launching. Addressing some points: 1. See item 3. 2. VP changes rarely happen compared to a PM change. And a PM who comes may change some of the goals, but the focus area of your product doesn't change, e.g. your optimization tool for display advertising will continue to be an optimization tool for display advertising. It would be hard to find your project suddenly disagreeing with some "existing strategy." 3. New products that launch should have a UX designer contributing or at least advising. There should be mocks for the frontend engineers to follow, and the backend engineers are just told to make it work. 4. Yeah, there's a checklist, and it is long. SREs want to minimize the number of pages there, but pages happen because something's going bad, and they want you to have proper monitoring in place to address the pages quickly. The launch checklist also focuses a lot on addressing potential security vulnerabilities. Google is tough on security. 5. Google's all about the software compensating for commodity hardware. I don't think too many teams have specialized hardware. You can ask for what resources you need, but would have to fight for what form you get them in. 7. Can't speak for this. Why reorganize marketing? 8. While I agree that Google likes to fail fast, in my opinion some Google products probably didn't get the love or time they needed to take off. I wasn't really privy to how those decisions are made.