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by potatolicious 867 days ago
It's the org chart. Google doesn't have a centralized marketing department that governs all of the company's products. Marketing is handled at the PA level (or sometimes even lower).

Likewise for engineering, Google is organized into Product Areas (Geo, Search, Cloud, etc.), which also explains why one product would get some feature that would really make sense integrated into another... but it never happens.

Google is exceptionally good at making its products be near-perfectly reflective of its internal organization scheme. So reflective you can brush your teeth with it.

I'm often a broken record about this on HN - but IMO the PA organizational structure is a strong inhibitor to Google's success and ability to create coherent suites of products.
2 comments
gmerc 867 days ago
bingo. Google has long been reduced to ship their org chart. Visible every single time - hangouts to chat to whateverthe hell
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mushufasa 867 days ago
On the flip side, which large tech companies that have have an equally high velocity of shipping do this well?

Amazon?

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potatolicious 867 days ago
Mmm I don't really agree with the premise of the question at all. In my experience Google doesn't ship significantly faster than any other FAANG.

Meta for example ships extraordinarily quickly (see: Threads) but their products are considerably more tightly integrated and demonstrate an ability to leverage across the ecosystem (see: Instagram-Threads integration) that Google has trouble with.

More to the point (and extra points in favor of Meta for this): Google's apparent product velocity is a bit deceptive? The company ships a lot of ill-considered product. Is it superior product velocity if the product is consistently half-baked (and maybe more importantly: will die before it ever becomes fully baked)?

If you put those two factors together and consider product velocity as how quickly a company ships stuff that actually sticks (as opposed to a simple exercise in how quickly one can release code), Google's product velocity is IMO substantially inferior to all of FAANG. Meta, Apple, Amazon, and MSFT at this point are generating sticky product at a substantially greater pace.

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