Needing to make new products to get promoted is a bit of an exaggeration. The people who need to launch new products to get promoted are generally are directors

Needing to make new products to get promoted is a bit of an exaggeration. The people who need to launch new products to get promoted are generally are directors or maybe L7s, which is a small minority of Googlers. For the majority of people, it's more that you need to "launch" something, which could mean many different things depending on what part of the company you are in. For example, if you are SRE, a promo project could be designing and implement a new set of SLOs that better represent service state and work better in a demonstrable manner. If you are a SWE on an infra team, it could be adding a feature that solves some problems that internal customers are facing that nobody outside Google will ever see.