[senbrow]

As someone who used to work there, Google will never get product releases right in general because of how bureaucratic and heavyweight their launch processes are.

They force the developing team to have a huge number of meetings and email threads that they must steer themselves to check off a ridiculously large list of "must haves" that are usually well outside their domain expertise.

The result is that any non-critical or internally contentious features get cut ruthlessly in order to make the launch date (so that the team can make sure it happens before their next performance review).

It's too hard to get the "approving" teams to work with the actual developers to iron these issues out ahead of time, so they just don't.

Buck passed, product launched.

[etruong42]

Spot on. I would suggest a slightly different framing where the antagonist isn't really the "approving" teams but "leaders" who all want a seat at the table and exercise their authority lest their authority muscles atrophy. Since they're not part of the development, unless they object to something, would they really have any impact or leadership?

I always laugh-cry with whomever I'm sitting next to whenever launch announcements come out with more people in the "leadership" roles than the individual contributor roles. So many "leaders" but none with the awareness or the care of the farcical volumes such announcements speak.

[gopher_space]

Involving everyone who shows up to meetings is a great way to move forward and/or trim down attendees. Management who enjoys getting their brain picked or homework assignments are always welcome.

[etruong42]

That's presuming a healthy culture. In an unhealthy culture, some people will feel pressure to uphold some comment that someone "senior" made offhand in a meeting several months ago, even if that leader is no longer attending project meetings. The people who report to this leader may otherwise receive blowback if the "decision" their leader made is not being upheld, whether such a leader recalls their several-month-old decision correctly or not, in the case they recall it at all. I have found it frustratingly-more-common-than-I-would-like where people, including leaders, retroactively adjust their past decisions so that they claim "I-told-you-so" and "you-should-have-done-what-I-said".

In response to your comment, yes, I would largely be in favor of moving forward only with whatever is said in the relevant meetings with the given attendees of a meeting. That assumes a reasonably healthy culture where these meetings are scheduled in good faith reasonable times for all relevant stakeholders.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yep, that and (also used to work there) the motivations of the implementing teams end up getting very detached from the customer focus and product excellence because of bureaucratic incentives and procedures that reward other things.

There's a lot of "shipping the org chart" -- competing internal products, turf wars over who gets to own things, who gets the glory, rather than what's fundamentally best for the customer. E.g. Play Music -> YouTube Music transition and the disaster of that.

[senbrow]

Hah, that exact transition was my last project there before I decided I had had enough!

The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree when we merged into the YT org.

After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the transition was fully underway because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had done the same.

[pcf]

That is so sad to hear. I absolutely loved Google Play Music – especially features like saving e.g. an online Universal Music release to my "archive" and then for myself being able to actually RENAME TRACKS with e.g. wrong metadata.

That and being able to mix my own uploaded tracks with online music releases into a curated collection almost made it a viable contender to my local iTunes collection.

And then... they just removed it forever. Bastards.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yep, YTM is/was so clearly the inferior product it's laughable. Even as a Google employee with a discount etc (I can't remember what that was, but) on these things I switched to Spotify when they dropped it.

I worked on a team that wrote software for Chromecast based devices. The YTM app didn't even support Chromecast, our own product, and their responses on bug tickets from Googlers reporting this as a problem was pretty arrogant. It was very disheartening to watch. Complete organizational dysfunction.

I think YTM has substantially improved since then, but it still has terrible recommendations, and it still bizarrely blurs between video and music content.

Google went from a company run by engineers to one run by empire-building product managers so fast, it all happened in a matter of 2-3 years.

[cmrdporcupine]

Sounds like we left roughly around the same time and due to similar frustrations.

[verst]

As someone who just GA'd an Azure service - things aren't all that different in Azure. Not sure how AWS does service launches but it would be interesting to contrast with GCP and Azure.