Faster iteration & execution: Insights from Google Workspace’s AI product experience journey w/ Anurag Agarwal #204

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

ABOUT ANURAG AGARWAL

Anurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create, and build together.

With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early-stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information.

Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family.

SHOW NOTES:

• A current update on Google Workspace (2:46)
• Strategies for getting teams to faster iteration & execution (4:41)
• Prioritizing the right problems & how to set a unified vision to work toward (7:11)
• Questions to ask to help rationalize during prioritization conversations (10:48)
• Components of streamlining the decision-making process (13:33)
• Anurag’s recommendations for facilitating decision-making conversations (15:00)
• How to encourage your team to ask the right questions & push back (16:55)
• Frameworks for identifying areas of inefficiency / friction (20:17)
• Steps for increasing confidence on the front end for an AI product experience (23:38)
• Filtering insights for faster iteration on AI product concepts (25:59)
• Measure user impact & make adjustments quickly based on that feedback (27:38)
• Reducing barriers to feature discovery (29:33)
• Enabling discovery & engagement of new product experiences (32:05)
• The role of pilots when testing different product experience changes (35:17)
• The future product launches Anurag is most excited (39:10)
• Rapid fire questions (40:36)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Google AI is now included, with no add-ons required or usage limits, in Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. Find out more: https://goo.gle/3PsIwf1
• How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen - Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, David Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to helping readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/