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Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incohe

Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done about it.

disqard 3y ago
If you're willing to share, how long ago did you quit?
- endtime 3y ago
  April 2022, after 10.5 years there.
potatolicious 3y ago
+1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership. Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only concerned with the people-management side of the org. There was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of anything about the products we owned. Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about the products they own. What a breath of fresh air. The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of features ourselves with little guidance from upper management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because senior management changed their minds about some overarching strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere. Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader. Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google kills so many projects - it demands insane metrics to approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close, and whole projects die as a result. I feel very firmly that Google as a company needs a reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that has any product credibility.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor, only to be immediately removed.
- danaris 3y ago
  The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there—senior management being primarily concerned with making the organization work well for the people in it, with the people further down the ladder being the ones directly in charge of the products—is inherently a bad or unworkable one. It just requires the senior leadership to openly acknowledge that it means they don't own the products, and shouldn't be the ones making decisions on them, at least not without extensive discussion with the people in the organization that do own the products. That includes decisions to kill off a product, for any reason other than a dire emergency. The problem, as is so depressingly common, is that being higher up in the org chart makes them believe they are better, smarter people, who always know best. So they make decisions without getting the right information, and very frequently for the wrong reasons.
  - potatolicious 3y ago
    I pretty fundamentally disagree, though of course I don't think your argument is unreasonable for a smaller product. For companies where products are relatively small and largely disconnected from one another I think your approach can work - senior leadership is largely concerned about maintaining the organization while explicitly delegating product ownership to team leads below. The problem is that this falls part really quickly once the products reach a certain feature scale, and in fact attempts to do this is IMO responsible for a lot of the product incoherency in a company like Google. For example, when I was there, there were multiple features that launched on Android Maps but never on iOS Maps. This was an example of shipping the org chart - the Android Maps team came up with the feature and shipped it, and the iOS team was separate and uninvolved. Of course shipping one's org chart is not an exclusively Google problem and is very common - but it's a fundamental consequence of delegating product ownership downwards. The ownership of the Android and iOS apps were necessarily separate because of the sheer size of these products and their teams, and there is no effective way to coordinate between them. Sure, theoretically everyone can play nicely and talk to each other and sell each other on how great of a feature it is - but realistically that just doesn't work. The coordination overhead between teams when there is no high-level forcing function is extreme and grinds work to a halt. In reality what you need is a VP or Director-level to say "we need this on both OSes, prioritize shipping this feature on both ends". And that... definitionally breaks the notion of downward product delegation.
pinewurst 3y ago
My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.
- asielen 3y ago
  My current place is like this but with Salesforce leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce about the old days. Their first inclination is always to try to implement whatever they were doing there. But this is a very different industry and marke. Every few months we end up rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.

disqard 3y ago

If you're willing to share, how long ago did you quit?

endtime 3y ago
April 2022, after 10.5 years there.

potatolicious 3y ago

+1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership. Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only concerned with the people-management side of the org. There was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of anything about the products we owned. Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about the products they own. What a breath of fresh air. The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of features ourselves with little guidance from upper management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because senior management changed their minds about some overarching strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere. Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader. Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google kills so many projects - it demands insane metrics to approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close, and whole projects die as a result. I feel very firmly that Google as a company needs a reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that has any product credibility.

JohnMakin 3y ago
This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor, only to be immediately removed.
danaris 3y ago
The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there—senior management being primarily concerned with making the organization work well for the people in it, with the people further down the ladder being the ones directly in charge of the products—is inherently a bad or unworkable one. It just requires the senior leadership to openly acknowledge that it means they don't own the products, and shouldn't be the ones making decisions on them, at least not without extensive discussion with the people in the organization that do own the products. That includes decisions to kill off a product, for any reason other than a dire emergency. The problem, as is so depressingly common, is that being higher up in the org chart makes them believe they are better, smarter people, who always know best. So they make decisions without getting the right information, and very frequently for the wrong reasons.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  I pretty fundamentally disagree, though of course I don't think your argument is unreasonable for a smaller product. For companies where products are relatively small and largely disconnected from one another I think your approach can work - senior leadership is largely concerned about maintaining the organization while explicitly delegating product ownership to team leads below. The problem is that this falls part really quickly once the products reach a certain feature scale, and in fact attempts to do this is IMO responsible for a lot of the product incoherency in a company like Google. For example, when I was there, there were multiple features that launched on Android Maps but never on iOS Maps. This was an example of shipping the org chart - the Android Maps team came up with the feature and shipped it, and the iOS team was separate and uninvolved. Of course shipping one's org chart is not an exclusively Google problem and is very common - but it's a fundamental consequence of delegating product ownership downwards. The ownership of the Android and iOS apps were necessarily separate because of the sheer size of these products and their teams, and there is no effective way to coordinate between them. Sure, theoretically everyone can play nicely and talk to each other and sell each other on how great of a feature it is - but realistically that just doesn't work. The coordination overhead between teams when there is no high-level forcing function is extreme and grinds work to a halt. In reality what you need is a VP or Director-level to say "we need this on both OSes, prioritize shipping this feature on both ends". And that... definitionally breaks the notion of downward product delegation.

pinewurst 3y ago

My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.

asielen 3y ago
My current place is like this but with Salesforce leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce about the old days. Their first inclination is always to try to implement whatever they were doing there. But this is a very different industry and marke. Every few months we end up rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.