Itamar Gilad: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's my pleasure. I thought we'd start with the story of your work on Google+ and Gmail and how those experiences formed your perspective on how to build a successful product. Can you share that story? Google+ was my first experience at Gmail, I joined Gmail in August 2011 and the first thing they asked me is, "Let's connect Gmail with Google+." If you're hazy about the story, back then Facebook was massive. It's still massive but then it was growing like mushrooms, people were spending hours. That really freaked out Google and the obvious solution was to launch a social network of Google called Google+ and we all believe in this thing, it really caught on very well initially we all used it, we all believed in it. So our mission was to build this thing and Google really cut no costs. It created a whole new division within Google and it created a whole strategy around Google+ and we had to connect Gmail and YouTube and search to Google+ to make them more personalized in a sense and more social. So that was the idea and we went on and we launched a series of features in Gmail for a couple of years, honestly and Google+ itself became this massive project, very feature rich and with a lot of redesigns and iterations and none of it worked. It turned out people actually didn't need another social network, people didn't love it, people didn't use it. Eventually in Gmail we rolled back all the Google+ integration a few years later and Google+ itself was shut down in 2019. So putting aside all the tremendous waste that went into this, all the millions of person hours and personal weeks. In hindsight, not only did Google bet on the wrong thing it missed much easier opportunities. So just not far from Google's headquarters there was WhatsApp, not very famous in the US but they actually created massive impact. Hundreds of millions of people were using their stuff and they became a threat to Facebook much more than Google was. So Google missed the opportunity of social mobile apps like WhatsApp, like Snapchat, etc and for me this story kind of was the epitome of what I call today, opinion-based development. We come up with an idea, we believe in it, all the indications show it's good. Maybe the early tests show it's good, then we just go all in and we try to implement it and I made this very mistake many times as the product manager, I was the guy pushing for the ideas. So for me, this was kind of a turning point I felt we need to adopt a different system. And just before you move on to the next story, how big was the team? Roughly how many years was spent on this area? Just to give people a sense of the waste as you said.…

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