Google Cloud — No Longer a Startup

My first PM task at Google was to launch Monarch — Google’s planet scale monitoring service for Google’s apps and services (Maps, Gmail, etc). Talk about the opposite of “easy early wins”! But with the help of others (see above “Heaven for..”) I managed to successfully launch it, and found my way into the cloud org circa early 2013.

Only back then, it really felt like a startup. We were pressed to find product market fit amidst fierce competitors that had years of head start (AWS) and armies of sales and marketing teams (Azure). And users still had questions of whether or not we were here to stay.

Not surprisingly we’ve found success with customers that were similar to Google. When I first engaged with Snapchat I believe they were less than 10 people, but the scale and automation they were looking for were not unlike what we knew in other parts of Google.

So we’ve made some mistakes. Two meaningful ones to be precise.

Our first — taking too long to recognize the potential of the enterprise. We were led by very smart engineering managers — that held tenures of 10+ years at Google, so that’s what grew their careers and that’s what they were familiar with. Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from “Large Orgs”. This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering, resulting in the aforementioned being inferior compared to the competitors’.

The second mistake was chasing the competition. For example, AWS was having great success with EC2 (VMs). And customers were asking for it on GCP. So our native internal way of running things — containers — was to take a backseat for a few years, until a small startup by the name of Docker managed to hype up containers enough to make them relevant. Google took notice, and the rest is history. Another example is App Engine — predating today’s “serverless” hotness by a few years, and arguably a successful business even back then. Neither AWS or Azure had anything like it, but we had to divert too many resources to satisfy customers that were asking for features similar to what our competitors offered at the time.