This was one of my biggest frustrations that weighed on my decision to leave the company. The PMs I worked directly with rarely felt a true sense of ownership and pride over the roadmap and evolution of value to users. They never bothered to think how the future was evolving. They seemed to be brought in on pretty regular rotation with no attachment. They were mostly interested in seeing product management as some kind of accounting/ROI management problem. They would go through a long list of line items and try to assign priority and tried to remove as many things as they could. They also wanted to make the few things they did commit to seem much bigger than they actually were. I most directly saw this with Android Camera framework and APIs. The worst part was sitting through feedback meetings from developers. Instead of truly listening and challenging their current views, they would try to fit the feedback to their current view and dismiss a lot of really important insights from the field.
After doing mobile dev that has worked directly with the Android Camera API, it shows. I believe Snapchat notoriously was held up, back in the day at least, in rolling out Android features due to how much of a mess it was.
Bluetooth has traditionally been another disaster zone. The low level APIs for interfacing with hardware shows a distinct lack of care for how the developer experiences things.
And on a meta level, either I'm improving way more than I give myself credit for, but whenever I dive under the hood these days of certain Android libraries, the underlying quality and elegance of design seems to be decreasing over time and questioning how certain PMs let some instances of kludges past their review process that I, who will never, ever pass a Google interview process, would reject completely out of hand if someone put them in a PR to a codebase I managed. I'm noticing a certain amount of increasing Reflection usage bleeding into libraries these days that you would expect at a widget factory who lost the original source code, not a FAANG company inside their own core platform. It betrays either a loss of control of the situation by product managers, or, more likely, teams are increasingly not able to interact across project departments and collaboration is being replaced with increasing inter-team hostility/indifference.
I don't know anything about the inner workings of Google. However, if they were all mostly doing that kind of thing, it's probably what was expected and rewarded by whoever they worked for.
If, for example, finishing projects on the original projected timeline is heavily weighted...you get the ruthless scope cutting you mention. Or, if compensation is tied to team size, you get empire building.
Yes thats exactly it. the problem was in OKR setting and expectations. The PMs got unfairly rewarded for things that didn't matter. Android releases on a regular cadence and I think just meeting the release deadline with some set of namable new things was enough to receive the bulk of performance compensation. It didn't matter if app developers were still jumping through painful hoops to get Camera detection, usage, debugging, etc working across a highly fragmented ecosystem of chips and sensors. It wasn't part of the OKR to fix it, and it certainly wasn't fixable within an OKR planning cycle.
Yes and in Android, where I observed this, it's going to some of the worst. It was a defensive move instead of true insight into what mobile look like. Perhaps the one driving differentiated vision might be "open". But as the OEM world increasingly moves towards a collection of Apples, longevity and followthrough are going to be tough to deliver. I still think there is some great product muscle in areas like Google Cloud. Despite being highly competitive with AWS and Azure, at least it's born out of a desire to share their own best infrastructure with the rest of the world. They should be doing this and feels important. Despite Google shuttering the game studio, I think products like Stadia are going to do well, built on the backbone of Youtube (casting streams or jumping into existing with your game) and Assistant (in game tutorials/help). When you are as big as Google some things are just going to be sputtering and unfortunately that was in the area I worked.
