It’s hard to believe that I’ve spent over a decade at Google, but I’ve never worked on the core product: search. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that I joined the Search team, where I’ll be focusing on local and travel search. I knew I should take the job when I was thinking about how LLMs can make date nights more delightful.
But First, Thank you Nest and Pixel.
Before I dive into my new role, I want to thank the Nest and Pixel teams. Although the last three years have been challenging, both personally and professionally, I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished. From the Pixel tablet and home app to the latest generation of Chromecast, thermostats and cameras, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of these products in any way. I’m also thankful to Rishi and Rick for being incredible sponsors and taking a chance on me. I will continue to be a customer and a fan forever.
Looking back at my experience with Nest, I’ve picked up a lot of valuable lessons about building hardware. But as always the enduring lessons are about how to lead regardless of what products we are building.
Lesson 1: Leading with curiosity and creating safety spaces
When I first joined the Nest team, it became very clear that everyone will forget more about their area of expertise (wifi, energy, security, thermals, audio) than I will ever learn. It was humbling to say the least. The first insight I had was this is complex at every level (technical, organization, and ecosystem) and while everyone was an expert in their area, leaders were often siloed and too busy to ask questions on adjacent areas. So how do we create a culture of curiosity and a safe and respectful space for questions?
Ask “Dumb” questions:
I had a great UX partner say the best UX is one that seems obvious in hindsight. Same can said about great products. A consumer should be able to understand the why to buy in 30 seconds. So part of my job was to ask the “dumb” questions and help the team get to the core of the product. One of the common patterns was trying too much because we were not clear who the user is.
Always give context and perspective:
The hardest decisions are about tradeoffs. This goes back to clarity about the user and why to buy and recognizing that focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. This gets more complex when we are looking at a portfolio of products and finite resourcing. Our job as leaders is to give perspective and context to every decision so that everyone can over time understand and see the whole picture. A good practice is to hold a retrospective for major product pivots with the cross functional leadership team to explain why and allow for questions, feedback, and refinement of the decision.
Publically acknowledging mistakes:
With this role I went from managing a small team I hired directly to a senior team of managers (mostly directors). It was my job to prioritize across programs, make hard calls, and veto my leads occasionally. There were times where I made the wrong call. The key for me was: giving context for the decision and being honest when I made the wrong call with a diagnosis on why. It can be big things like canceling a program because we over-estimated our capabilities as a team or a small thing like hey sorry that email last night wasn’t helpful.
Lesson 2: Build a tribe
Looking back, joining the team as a new mom during COVID was the best and the worst. I lost all my normal tools for building relationships: off-sites, lunch 1–1s, white-boarding. In fact it took almost 2 years for me to meet my team in person. But it also meant that I found new tools that scale for creating a lasting community regardless of proximity. Here are some of my favorite traditions from the Nest PM team.
Sharing life stories:
I didn’t come up with this idea but I am shamelessly sharing it and I hope you do too. It started with Rishi’s staff meetings, where every leader shared their life story from where they were born to what they were like as a kid to how they met their spouse to how they ended up in this job. It was eye opening to take 30 mins to really understand your co-worker as a whole person and it gave us so much empathy and appreciation for each other. This spread to my staff meeting to their staff meetings and on…
Real talks:
During Covid years, we started a tradition to replace the “water cooler” where every Friday a Nest PM would share a real talk. It can be on any topic and in any format (email/video/haiku). It gave us space again to get to know each other in these little snippets and even when the real talks ended, the tone of the conversation among the Nest PM community was never the same again. Here are some of my favorite real talks
- what it’s like to work from the laundry room for months
- the challenges of being a working parent
- how no one can pronounce my names
- a music video about how buggy our products
- how to work and donate to non profits
- My last real talk I revealed my pregnancy by standing up
Monthly coffee meetups:
Big off-sites are great but we are lucky if they happen 2x a year. When we went to hybrid work, we started a new tradition. Monthly PM coffees: every PM lead took a turn hosting and bringing goodies to go with coffee. All managers made a commitment to be there in person. It was a chance to relax, mingle, have fun conversations about the holidays, summer vacations, kids or hard conversations like the aftermaths of a reorg in an safe setting with pastries. It gave me a chance to have quick chats with PMs who I don’t see daily and do quick pulse checks (skip levels, APMs, etc)
Lesson 3: Invest in managers and management
This is an oldie but a goodie. What I’ve found the hardest thing is figuring out HOW to do this at scale. Here are some things that worked for me.
Prioritize 1–1s and Skip levels
This is a really simple one. I made my 1–1s my top priority. The thing that isn’t so obvious are skip levels. I set a very intentional practice of doing skip levels with my top talent, new PMs who just joined, or taken on new roles, under represented talent and all managers. These weren’t recurring meeting but they were a quarterly list that I evaluated regularly. In these meetings, I usually asked something along of the lines:
- How are you?
- What are you most worried about?
- What’s frustrating you?
- What are you excited about?
- How can I help?
Usually I made it a practice to get a sense of what people were looking for in their career and where the current role was falling short. Often, it helped me connect the right person to the right opportunities when they came up. It also gave me context on how to coach someone in reviews or what feedback was useful for their managers.
Career plans
We made it a goal that every Nest PM had a career plan that was updated yearly and every manager had a 1–1 focused on the career plan. I offered a template as a starting place but the goal was that the manager and the PM showed up prepared to have an actionable chat. Some of those conversations led to real change and some perhaps felt a bit awkward/formal, but I think everyone felt a little more seen and sponsored.
Manager forums and off-sites
We had a standard monthly with all PM managers and an offsite just for managers every 6 months. We usually shifted between 3 topics: logistics (at a company like Google, there is process/paperwork), strategy and industry trends (up-level our work, common problems and how product areas connected to each other), and people management (talent reviews, panels, etc). Overlying all this, there are 2 messages I tried to repeat consistently:
- Management is a real job. I expect all of us to take it seriously and put in the time. It is the most important thing you can do to make the product and business better. What can I/your leads do support you in that?
- We are responsible for this team together. I had bad news one year that showed majority of the PM team was frustrated/unhappy. I have to admit it was a punch to the stomach and I went immediately into how can I fix this. When I shifted my perspective and asked the managers: “how can we fix this?”, it changed everything. Everyone went from giving me problems to creating solutions together.
I already miss the Nest team, it was home for me in a very real way, so I will say thank you again for everything.
What I’m excited about in search…
Local and Travel is a product area that’s near and dear to my heart. As an elder millennial, I understand #wanderlust. I have been to 39 countries and all 7 continents. I have done the crazy budget travel life where I stayed in hostels, backpacking, and taking flights with 3 hops to save money. The adventure travel to climb mountains in my 20s. Now as a working mom, I optimized for either indulgent getaways or well equipped vacation rentals near beaches and playgrounds. As a city dweller for life, I am always exploring both the old and new in my city for both practical and impractical reasons. Whether it’s finding a new restaurant to celebrate a birthday or date night or a tree trimmer to take care of the redwood in our backyard before the next storm. I have used Google search and maps for every one of those decisions. So I think I can safely say I can’t live without Google but I think we can do better.
Things I am excited about in no particular order:
- Applying LLM/AI to a real world problem and understanding the opporutnities and constraints in a real way.
- Helping billions of users and millions of businesses connect.
- Learning how search works from the inside and being part of the next evolution of Google search.
- Meeting and learning from my new team which is a mix of search/ads veterans and newcomers .
- Going on some cool trips, learning some awesome local/travel hacks, and discovering cool new experiences as part of dogfooding our products :P.
Thanks everyone! I hope my lessons at Nest helps you just a little bit.
Rose
