What's It Like To Work At Google?

Curious about what it’s like to work at Google and manage teams that impact millions?

In this episode, host Shobhit Chugh sits down with Kanad Das, who shares his incredible journey from Microsoft to Google. Kanad provides an insider’s perspective on leading teams and driving impact at one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

What We Cover in This Episode:

• Navigating Complex Organizations: How to master strategies for thriving and making an impact in large, multifaceted companies.
• Interviewing at Top Tech Firms: Insights into the importance of behavioral interview preparation and how to stand out among tough competition.
• Staying Ahead in AI: Must-know resources and tips to keep your skills current and future-ready.
• Crafting Your Narrative: The art of creating a personal story that demonstrates depth, trust, and certainty, setting you apart as the ideal candidate.

Why You Should Listen: If your career vision includes working at a tech giant or enhancing your product management skills, this episode is packed with practical insights and actionable advice from someone who’s been there and succeeded. Kanad’s strategies can help you turn interviews into job offers and chart a course for long-term career success.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:19 Guest Introduction: Kanad Das

00:35 Kanad's Career Journey

01:19 Transition to Google

03:13 Role and Responsibilities at Google

05:44 Challenges and Learnings

10:44 Building and Leading Teams

16:42 Technical Skills and AI

22:29 Interview Tips for Google

27:13 Conclusion and Contact Information

Learn more about Shobhit Chugh at intentionalproductmanager.com and connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhitchugh/

Learn more about Kanad Das at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanaddas/ 

www.intentionalproductmanager.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Podcast
• 0:19 Guest Introduction: Kanad Das
• 0:35 Kanad's Career Journey
• 1:19 Transition to Google
• 3:13 Role and Responsibilities at Google
• 5:44 Challenges and Learnings
• 10:44 Building and Leading Teams
• 16:42 Technical Skills and AI
• 22:29 Interview Tips for Google
• 27:13 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

 Ready to move to the next level in your product career. I'm Shobhit from Intentional Product Manager. Join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career, so you can have more impact and make more money. 

Awesome. So with me is Kanad Das, who has been a group product manager at Google and currently working on his stealth startup. Karnad, welcome to this podcast. Hey, thanks Shobhit for having me. Awesome. So for our audience, you know, they want to get to know you a little bit. So just tell us a bit about your career path so far.

Yeah. So I started off as an engineer doing software development, and then I moved on to product management. My transition to product management was, I really liked going in front of customers and evangelizing what we are building. And, you know, for the first time I got exposure on how decisions are made on what we build and why we build.

Right. And that was the transition. And then eventually I, you know, I was at the startup at that time. And then I moved on to Microsoft where I was introduced to the world of search. And I was kind of enamored, uh, with the internet scale, you know, getting to do work that touched 300, 400 million people's lives simultaneously.

With the work that you do and then of course, be after, uh, we, when we are at Bing, we were chasing the taillights of Google and then I moved to Google and then you get exposed to true internet scale because now you're talking billions of users that you can. And then there is a method to the madness that Google has mastered in some sense.

And that also forces you to be very disciplined. Thoughtful about how you approach problems and why you want to solve that problem and good balance of outcome driven innovation and a good amount of satisfaction, right? So, which I think is a pretty good feeling at the end of the day, once you get through that process and journey.

And then after that AI happened and then I have been. Wanting to dabble my hands into AI and, you know, old habits of being a technical guy die hard. And I think the tools that are out there today actually make a PM's life a lot more empowered. That is what I would say. You can quickly prototype stuff, your ideas that you have, right?

A little bit of, you know, getting out of your comfort zone, wanting to code. For me, it has always been that I cannot start coding from scratch, but if I get A piece of code. I think I can work with it. And that's what is happening today, right? With a bunch of things out there. So that's very important. I might come back to this later because this is a very interesting topic right now.

And obviously top of people's minds. I used to joke that I can code anything you want. I just can't debug anything. I can't debug.  That used to be my go to line. But okay, let's go back. So you mentioned, you know, you were at Microsoft. Did you come into Google as, you know, a group PM or like, did you like come in?

What are the paths to that? Yeah. I came into Google as group PM interviewed and got in as perfect. So let's talk about more from a perspective of, you know, in this episode, we're trying to demystify this role. So when you came in, like, what was your team charter? They both direct team as well as cross functional peers and whatnot, just trying to understand what it looked like, and then how did it evolve over time?

Yeah, so when I joined, I joined as a IC and I was hesitant a little bit because I had been a PM manager leader for some time at Bing, but I think the opportunity to actually have such a huge and wide impact. Was one thing that was really crucial for me and both level wise as well as salary wise, it wasn't a down level as such salary bump was there.

The opportunity to have an impact was also higher. So from that perspective, It was great, but yes, you are not leading another set of PMs as such. But that was like for like six months initially. So when I joined, I actually joined the enterprise search group. So it's called cloud search, uh, part of the workspace team.

And then, you know, I kind of worked through Account management team, sales team. And that was the time when the COVID shutdown was happening. So I actually wanted to meet customers. The good part about the COVID shutdown was that they didn't expect me to fly out there anymore. So I was able to meet almost like my run rate was like 10 customers a week.

10? Yes, I  reached out to the account management team as well as the resellers and they were just very happy to introduce me and get me that starting half an hour meeting. And I think what I learned from that was eye opening. In terms of what we were doing right and what we were not doing so right. And then I was able to come up with a set of things.

So initially that basically seeded my backlog in some sense. It's a bad word in the PM world, because it feels like you're going after a bunch of features, but it, you know, these are problem areas. For your customers. And then, so I think that was one of the best thing that I did in hindsight, talk to so many customers at a very fast pace to formulate my thought about what I should be doing.

And then after that, it is coming up with a proposal, working with your other PM peers, your leadership, engineering peers, and engineering leadership to come forth with a plan. What you should and shouldn't do. So the funny part was there were a lot of people who wanted to sunset that product. And then there was competitive pressure from Microsoft because they were, was started, they had started to work on being at work, they were making moves of integrating into the browser at that time.

So Chrome enterprise did want to work with us and make it. Part of Chrome, Chrome enterprise, right? But that was not the primary focus for workspace. The money was coming in from selling into SMBs and the productivity tools. Right. But then what happened is that I worked on a one really big account, huge account.

Like if I tell the name, it's like it'll pop out. Right. And we won that. And that was a proof point for one of my strategy that I put forth. But it is still one, right? I mean, at Google scale, if you are not, if you do not have a line of sight into a billion dollars, it doesn't mean a lot. Right. So even that one big customer doesn't really mean a lot.

So working through the business process to actually make certain changes into how you want the pricing to happen and all that stuff. It was very arduous, but I learned some of my key lessons working with the BPO process manager and the finance folks over there. And the lesson for me was in when you are with such a huge group like big sales teams, you know, your execs in there.

Right. What it takes to hold your ground when everybody is against what you are proposing, right? And I got mentoring from the most unexpected part, the BPO manager, the business process manager, actually, she helped me understand who's who, who will actually be able to, you know, help me with whatever I wanted to achieve.

So short of it, I think at Google, there are brilliant people. In every nook and corner, if you know to reach out, you will get help. That aspect really enamored me. Being a tech guy, being PM, I actually got help from finance team and somebody who was doing business process automation. I think it happens. In only orgs like Google.

I mean, it's, it's almost like, um, you know, we sometimes talk about, okay, here's the organizational chart, but here's the actual influence chart. And sometimes you have to look like beyond the obvious, okay, this is the person who's gonna do everything for me beyond the obvious manager or skip level manager and whatnot.

Yeah. Awesome. So then did you switch teams over you, you were mentioning or what happened? Yes. So a year into enterprise search, uh, I switched over to core search. Okay. Got it. This is what I was doing at Bing. Uh, so I moved over to core search and I spent almost close to two years, a little less than two years working on search answers.

Yeah. So, I mean, I worked on search answers for 18 months plus stock, right. And then a lot of things changed around me. Before you go on, tell people what search answers is because they might not be aware of what it is. Oh yeah. Search answers is essentially you ask Google on the URL bar a question and Google gives you an answer.

Right. And making it a little bit more nuanced, it could be like factual answers, you know, what's the height of LeBron James, who's Zendaya's boyfriend. So there are facts, but you could also ask questions like, you know, why is the sky blue? How do I get more likes on my TikTok channel? There are no factual answers for that, but I mean, there might be a factual answer, but more.

Exploratory oriented, right? So that gets you into whether you go access a knowledge graph, which is more deterministic or, you know, you dip into your web relevance stack to get an answer from, you know, one of the trillion documents out there, and then you find out the right snippet and boom, your answer comes out.

So what we are seeing today, like perplexity is doing, which is more abstract.  Summarization, right? You extract out answers from multiple documents and then you generate a answer for it, right? Google was doing that since 2016, not across multiple documents, but across from the one best document, right? And that's extractive summarization that Google is.

So exposure to tech at scale and what can be achieved, I think is mind boggling in the search world. Awesome. So then you mentioned you, then things changed around you. What was that? Oh, yeah. Uh, I think my role with answers remained and my managers, engineering teams that would work on it kept on changing.

I think I like four times it changed. Right. So the engineering team changed two times, but my manager and the org in which I was located changed. Google was going through a transition in terms of org at that time. So the good part was that my role wasn't really changed. So I, I was able to focus on the work that I have to do.

And this is the time you also mentioned earlier that, Hey, you had, you were IC, now you started to build out your team or like what happened around that? Yes. So I started to build out the team. Uh, the answers org had two PMs in there. So I inherited a team essentially. And then, you know, Google has got this fantastic APM program.

So for us managers, most managers, first thing that goes on is, Oh yeah, great free resource. 

And you get a really, very well motivated, smart guy who wants to work and, you know, chew through anything that you throw at them. So it's a fantastic program, right. I think for the people who are at it and also for the orgs who get it. Yeah. And there is a, like a, like  great method. Uh, you actually have to sell your problem space to the APMs.

Right. And then Oh wow. Somebody, you're hoping that somebody is going to choose and is able to, you know, relate to the problem space that you are working on and wants to work on it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, it's a great program for people starting out their career and in product especially. So since we are trying to demystify  this.

role, right? Like what, what is group PM? Like, tell me first, let's take you as an IC. How would that group PM role differ from, let's say somebody who joins post MBA, maybe at an L4, like what has changed? So I think in Google that I've seen is that with levels complexity of problem changes. It is not necessary that, you know, the, the scope of impact drastically changes.

It's not necessarily that, uh, it's the complexity of the problem that you handle changes, right? And the complexity can be thought of in many ways. There is inherent ambiguity in the problem definition itself. There can be organizational ambiguity involved. There can be other types of ambiguity involved, like You know, you are working with really challenging teams.

The problem ambiguity may not be as much the organization ambiguity may be there, but now you are dealing with, you know, Google has two decades of tech stack, right? And sometimes the tech stack requires transformation. And then every line of code that you touch in Google is probably impacted. Yeah. I'm just throwing out some sort of a semblance of a number over there, right?

So it, it makes life not that easy. And what I mean by that is that you have to be very thoughtful. You have to really dig deep, right? You have to be able to hypothesize what the changes that you are proposing will show up in terms of outcome, right? And along the line. What are the indicators that says that you will likely reach or deliver that outcome?

When the complexity increases, you are looking at, you know, hypothesizing for all these small, small problems, figuring out the outcomes, figuring out the indicators that you will actually reach the outcomes, right? So that requires. Why? And everything has to be data driven, right? Not just, you know, Google, you're sitting on primary data.

You don't need to look at secondary data. You ask for the log, you have the log, the world's log is right there. So you need to know how to look through, sift through the log, visualize those changes. And then articulate them and then, you know, you have to bring people together. Everybody has to be convinced every team has something or the other.

So right there, the challenges around dealing with pulling out insights, being data driven, you know, Bringing teams together. So when you are at a level seven, like I almost dealt with seven to eight different teams, if you are a IC level 4 PM, you will be working with, let's say two, three teams and the level of complexity of, you know, the data insights that are needed are  way different, right?

So the problem that I worked on, I'm looking at, you know, users behavior on. IOS devices, right? A level four guy would probably look at for a sliver on, let's say. This is very helpful discussion because one of the not just challenges, just like hesitations I do see in PMs who've managed other PMs is, Oh, if I go back to IC, I'm like being down leveled and this is what's happening.

And, you know, sometimes actually being an IC could be an awesome thing as long as the level of ambiguity, as you decide the scope. is big enough. It could be just as impactful, just as good in terms of compensation. All those things can still work out for you. Then you might build teams as well, if the scope desires.

Yeah, no, I think Google expects you. I mean, directors open up those tools. And not directors, VPs open up those tools. That is like session browsers. They will go into the session and see, okay, what query did you execute? Let me check that. They will visualize it themselves. Yes. In fact, yeah, this is great.

What you are saying, or no, take a look at this. This is also happening. So you are expected to be hands on, pull up your sleeves and get into the weeds. I mean, not level seven, level eight, level nine. Everybody gets into the weeds, right? So I think one has to appreciate what is at stake for Google if they don't do that.

On one query, you have millions of users. You have millions of users on a daily basis. So I mean, You cannot not do something like that. So yeah. So ask of people is very much be hands on, be very technical, be able to understand how each of these changes will actually affect or impact users. So analytics becomes very critical, being able to work through metrics, being able to work through measurements, translating user behavior into what you should measure. 

You said be technical, so help demystify that for me by like, maybe unbundling it a little bit more somebody coming into Google at that level. Do they need to be an engineer? If not, like, what are the kind of skills they should possess? Like, Just one more level of breakdown would be helpful. Firstly, you don't have to be an engineer.

That I had studied computer science is just incident. But I didn't study everything that I learned and picked up at Google. Google has its own set of tools. You have to learn those tools, right? I think there is training available for it. You are given sufficient time, you just have to learn it, right?

Initially, you know, I also went through this whole thing. Oh man, I have to learn this. And then you immediately get over that hump once you actually do it and you start seeing what you get out of it. You have never visualized the user sessions, the way you can visualize yours. So being technical. In the sense that there are tools, you have to be open to learning those tools and utilizing those tools.

Right. And when you use those tools, yeah, you know, you have to probably write some SQL queries as well. So it's not like you have to learn how to code in Python and R and understand intricacies of knowledge graphs and document. Yeah. None of that is. Right. If you do understand that it's very good because you know, there is something called as you featurize in the AI ML world, you can then featurize better.

So I think this is something that you learn on the job. The most important thing to understand is. Not have any hangups that this is my world and this is not my world, right? Everything is my world. If I can have the right impact on the right outcome, important thing is do not just work through it and think through what is important to yourself, you will have a lot of help, get the right help and the get the right mentorship.

And I think be open to adapting yourself. Love it. Yeah, I agree with that. I, in fact, recently on the podcast, we, we had Ravi Mehta. Who'd been CPO at Tinder as a guest, and now he's working on a new idea. And he was like, cool. I'm coding. I, my Figma skills are now better off than they used to be. And just like have jumped right in because that's what's required right now.

And there's no like, Oh no, I manage people. I don't do this sort of stuff. And I think one needs that. Yeah. I think what AI has done, I find it very liberating. You know, at there used to be times when we have to wait, you know, and that is like genuine team needs that, you know, the engineers have to work on certain things, right.

Uh, because you are also waiting for  that, right. But you still feel like handicapped. Oh man. If I could try out something right away today, you can try out something right away, the only thing that is stopping you is your own willingness to try. I think that helps this thing that your willingness to try out and be technical when needed is very helpful for yourself in your own career.

If I may ask one more question about the technical part, and I was going to come to it, but you mentioned AI. If somebody is Cool. I'm a good product manager. I haven't been necessarily working with AI much. What would be like the top two, three things you ask them to pick up or understand, or just work through to set themselves up for success?

I think there are so many free resources out there. YouTube is truly like not one university level, hundreds of universities out there, right. But it is very important to cut through this thing and really pick out things that are going to help be helpful. Right. So I think there is a little bit of structure needed in understanding that.

So definitely there are known people, top voices who are publishing things. Yeah. I think I have found that Maven also has. Very good resources. So if you followed the right set of people in the PM world, there is no way that you are not getting this advice that go learn certain things, certain courses. I don't want to name the distinct courses, but for sure, if you're following the right set of people and you follow Lenny, you follow Ben, you  know, you follow all the, you know, you cannot miss that, right?

If you are missing that, I think there is. Something even more before that. So I think understanding, taking, you know, reading those content does help, right? You do not have to go after certifications, but reading and understanding, then just do it. Right. I mean, Claude, combination of Claude and cursor is just amazing.

Claude and cursor. Yeah. Somebody was also telling me GPT, chat GPT and replit. I have not tried it, but Lauren cursor is just amazing. Then you have, you know, other tools also that are out there, but these are free to try. First of all, I want to echo two things you said, very important. One is every product manager should be subscribed to, in my opinion, Lillian's newsletter and strategy by Ben Thompson, who's a business school classmate of mine.

Just like absolutely one and it's 15 bucks a month. So 30 a month, 300 a year, it's just so totally worth it. And then like the second point it is that you don't have to go and learn how to build a LLM. It's first like you become amazing user of what AI is providing. And that gets you like deeper and deeper, but that's the right place to begin, right?

Like, am I saying the right thing? Does that make sense? No, no, you're absolutely right. I think it is important to know the use of technology and their limits or what is the cost of it, right? Even better use the tools because it is there for us to use and you get a hands on feel. off. So if your customers are developers, you know, might as well try it.

And if your customers are going to be using the similar tools, you have the opportunity to try it yourself. So you are, in some sense, you are drop footing before you even. I agree. Be as technical as your end users. Excellent. Okay. One last question for you, Kunal. So let's say somebody is now going and going, is going to interview at Google for L7, or just like thinking about going at that level, what are like experiences is They should possess, like, what advice would you give them?

Yeah. So this is a great question, right? I think there is interview prep, a lot of interview prep around  interviewing at Google, interviewing at Facebook. But I think one thing critical is that those prep is not just prep, right? It helps to live some of those learnings in your work. That's when it becomes really ingrained, right?

So I've seen folks who need want help with interview prep, but the real question is, have you lived working that way? Or are you like responding to interview questions in a certain way? Right. Because when things get hard in an interview, you know, it's not very hard for the interviewer to pull down the sham from front and then the real thing comes out and at that time, when you're thinking through your experiences, if you have not really thought through it that way, right, it does not naturally come out that way.

So I think living through your learnings is very important at your present job. Right. So  that part I would say is very important. The second part that I would say is, and I think what your group does very well is really understand how to create narratives. Even for the most technical of the work that you have done, the narrative Behind it becomes extremely important.

The second part that I, the other thing that I would say is that, you know, when you are coming up with your narratives, be as authentic as possible, because otherwise it shows and that dissonance, even if the interviewer is unable to read through why, what is this happening, but they feel what is happening, something is not right, they feel the dissonance.

Right. And that likability aspect then automatically just goes away. So, you know, being authentic becomes very important so that you actually appear to a person of integrity and be likable to your interview, which goes well above and beyond that. How will you actually answer the question, right? You have to appear likable, if not be likable, right?

So that's the side story. Like the only people who we've like, really just like. Remove from our programmers who came in and they were like, cool, this, I wrote this story because this is how you told me how to write it like, wait, so you've not actually done this. You're like, cool, we can't do it. Sorry. This is not going to work,  but, but to your point, you've mentioned like ambiguity earlier on and the scope, like that needs to come out on the narrative.

And it feels that's where the people miss presenting. Uh, I'm going to use your words. You said ambiguity and complexity of problem and they don't bring it across. And I think that's the, what you mentioned at the beginning, that's really the magic of the narrative is, can you communicate why this problem was so complex, why your solution was so special for it in the work that you did?

Yes. So I think that part, right, I have struggled with it. I have, I know that I have struggled with it. You know, I have worked on really complex and very ambiguous problem. But then when I am talking about it, right. I mean, I talk in paragraphs and I can talk, so I feel so great about talking about what I have, which is so natural, but that's not effective, right?

I mean, that same ambiguous and complex problem, if I can land it in one to max two sentences, I think that's the most critical part. So. You know, knowing what you built, why you built it now, what, and so what is very important and that's all that is really needed to be said and for the person who has worked through it, they feel, I mean, I have been there, right?

I feel that my whole journey is the most important thing. And let me walk the person through my journey. Right. I mean, otherwise they are missing out on how awesome I am.  What is the, what is the crux of that? I bring to the table, right? But that's not what they're looking for. And I think it is very hard to mentally move out of that space and really focus on just that small bit.

That really lands the message and it's not easy. I have, I can say it's not easy at all. I agree. As my co founder, Sam says, like behavioral interviews are difficult, are really hard. And the problem is people think they are easy because they're just telling them, this is what I did. Cool. And then product design, everyone's like, it's like, Oh, that's difficult.

But you know, I don't believe so. Awesome. Can, if people want to connect with you, where, how should they connect? LinkedIn or LinkedIn? LinkedIn is the best way. I'm always available on LinkedIn and I, I think my contact details are also there. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having this conversation with me, for telling people all about this role and then also we covered other topics like ai, ml and how technical you need to be and, and whatnot.

Really appreciate your time. Awesome. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Show. Thanks a bunch. Thank you. Hey, be sure to check out our website at intentionalproductmanager.  com to see how you can level up in your career.