How to apply Google product management practices to your business

Over the last three decades, Google has had profound market impact in a variety of businesses, with nine of our products reaching over a billion users. This growth is the result of a deep-seated desire to understand and meet the needs of our users, a relentless focus on data-driven decision-making, and a culture of bottom-up autonomy and innovation driving new ideas from the people who are closest to them.

While Google has a large number of dedicated product managers, careful product management is an expectation for all roles. At its core, product management is about prioritizing — defining clear goals to guide a team in solving real, meaningful user problems. We know this works: Our user-centered approach has led to products like Gmail (the email inbox as a search problem) and Google Translate (breaking the language barriers of the early internet).

But product management isn’t always smooth sailing — it's also about navigating setbacks. Google views products as ongoing experiments, constantly evolving and adapting. Not every experiment will succeed, and this also requires a thoughtful approach to sunsetting beloved products and a steadfast commitment to a blameless postmortem culture.

These practices are not just specific to consumer-facing technology products. We also use them to help our customers drive value and growth within their own organizations. Within Google Cloud Consulting sits our delta team, which is dedicated to helping our customers achieve their most ambitious technology and business goals.

This team uses these same approaches to build new products and services side by side with our customers. We believe that helping our customers learn to build like Google is critical — not just to improve development speeds and morale but also fully utilize all of the benefits that cloud technologies and services can bring to an organization.

In this blog, we’ll share some of our critical learnings gained along the way working with our customers and highlight how our approach to product management can be applied to any part of your business to build the right things, faster.

Key Principles of Google's Product Management Approach

• Focus on the user: Prioritize user needs and understand their goals and pain points.
• Be data-driven: Use data and analytics to make informed decisions.
• Iterate quickly: Build and test prototypes, gather feedback, and improve products.
• Collaborate effectively: Foster teamwork and cross-functional alignment in product development.

Applying Google's product management approach to your business

While simple, these four core principles allow teams across Google to set 10X goals, advance towards them incrementally, and continuously reinforce roadmaps, or adjust the target based on new information. A bias towards action means that early prototypes or launches are not always comprehensive, but create opportunities to test assumptions in the real world, evolve the product with our users, or course correct as needed.

Let’s explore how these simple principles are put into action at Google, and how you can start applying them to your business to achieve your own moonshot goals.

1.Focus on the user (and all else follows)

The cornerstone of Google's product management philosophy is a relentless focus on the user. In order to build products our users will be excited and delighted to use, we must empathize deeply with their needs, wants, and desires.

Google keeps the user front and center during ideation, building, and testing solutions to get feedback early and often. We conduct foundational research to define personas and critical user journeys and evaluative research to learn if the iteration is achieving user goals.

“The User” can mean a wide variety of different people, not just the end-user of a consumer-facing product. For example, users could also be external developers using platforms or APIs, employees using internal-facing products, or senior stakeholders.

We recommend starting your own journey by conducting user experience (UX) research to define user wants, needs, goals and motivations, so that you can solve their real problems. Next, develop clear customer personas to represent different segments of the target audience, keeping their needs at the forefront of your product development efforts. Lastly, prioritize landings over launches. Good products are never finished, and the earlier you can get something in front of real users, the faster you can identify, refine, and deliver real value.

2. Lead with data, not opinions

Data-driven decision-making is another core principle of Google’s approach to product management. Product managers have to ruthlessly prioritize how the team spends its time, shaping its output through the roadmap. Without data, decisions will be made based on opinion and personal bias, and eventually, this could steer the team in the wrong direction.

At Google, we use a wide variety of evaluative research methods, including usability studies, surveys, shadowing, log analysis, and more. These techniques not only help us gather quantitative data to make more informed decisions and reduce risks, but also develop empathy, understand our users, and develop mental models to identify future product needs. No product team has unlimited, comprehensive access to data — especially when user data is involved — so successful product management requires an ability to work with what is available, translate it into insights, and drive towards a product roadmap and vision.

At the same time, product managers must be extremely careful to avoid data bias. Bias can lead to inaccurate conclusions, unfair outcomes, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. For that reason, quantitative data cannot be the only source of information. To get useful insights into the services that your teams provide, we recommend employing live Experiments – and don’t forget to eat your own dog food

3. Iterate (uncomfortably) quickly

Launches are uncomfortable, and it’s natural to want to continue refining a product until it is perfect. But launches give you feedback from users and allow them to help shape the direction of the product as it continues to evolve. This approach promotes innovation and agility, leading to better products, reduced risk, and faster market entry.

Product managers constantly drive decision-making — on priorities, features, iterations, targeted user journeys, UX and engineering complexity, business models and pricing approach, as well as overall strategic ambitions. These are not easily compared against each other, and metrics only go so far. To truly develop a strong “product sense,” teams need to know their products inside and out, constantly seek feedback from users, and design for their needs.

Moving quickly can be challenging. Quick iterations are the outcomes of ruthless prioritization. If everything is a P0 (high priority item), nothing is P0 — and nothing will get done. At the same time, this doesn’t mean you should take unnecessary risks. Google’s launch process, for instance, requires reviews from our legal, ethics, accessibility, and technical teams to ensure that moving fast doesn’t mean moving dangerously

4. Collaborate openly, embrace autonomy:

Product development requires UX, engineering, business, and other teams to work together towards a common roadmap. On their own, none of these functions can deliver delight to users. To deliver exceptional user experiences, a collaborative approach to product development is essential with cross-functional alignment, facilitated by clear communication, shared ownership, and mutual trust and respect within and across teams. To facilitate this, Google product teams rely on tools built for collaboration first, which define our approach to products like Workspace.

Google's open communication culture promotes blameless postmortems, fostering learning from mistakes and idea sharing. Successful product managers lead with influence and empathy, learning from their teams and peers, and connecting cross-functional teams as they navigate tough decisions. In addition, it’s also important to ensure that individual teams have autonomy. While collaborating with other product teams or cross-functional groups can help generate new and novel ideas, you also run the risk of having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” In order to do this successfully, you will need a deep trust across teams, an assumption of positive intent during conflicts, and the authority to make decisions, so you can move forward.

Ultimately, Google's product management approach can act as a helpful framework for growth in today's competitive business landscape. Many organizations across industries like healthcare, travel, automotive, entertainment, and more have adopted this approach and seen success. We recommend starting out by reflecting on a recent challenge your own organization has faced. Could these four principles have helped the process? If so, consider the approach for next time and be sure to check out our services to learn more about how Google Cloud Consulting and the delta team can help you achieve your goals.