I think it is incompetence of product managers. They ought to know how to use their own products, have a keen eye for design and functionality. You can’t A/B t

I think it is incompetence of product managers. They ought to know how to use their own products, have a keen eye for design and functionality. You can’t A/B test your way through UX/UI in a product like GMail. Sure, it works for a e-commerce front end but just because of UI problems, people aren’t going to ditch the entire GSuite like they would if it was a shopping website. They’d just close it and A/B tests would produce a strong signal. At Apple, when Steve was around, he had such a keen eye to details. He cared. So if PMs are getting fat checks and not getting scrutinized by their management, I blame the entire ladder upto Pichai for growing such a culture. Engineering at Google is top notch and lots of great things come out of there. Obviously, very smart people for there. I don’t think there are 9 people who don’t get it. You need a strong dictator at top. Google is becoming a snowflake like organization where it would be impossible to criticize products in favor of not offending anyone - at least that’s what it appears to me. And management doesn’t give a shit about their own products - you're right that the incentives just aren't there. I’m truly convinced that in order to produce top notch products, you need a military type dictatorship and harsh rejection of bad design - personalities such as Steve Jobs or Elon to make better products. Whether we want to work in such environments is orthogonal and up for debate.