For roughly its first 15 years, Google was engineering led, not PM led — yet remained deeply product- and user-focused. PMs supported engineering decisions; they did not lead them. When a PM disagreed with their engineering manager, the engineering manager's decision won. Dissenting PMs weren't fired, but they were given bad performance ratings — a soft, reputational enforcement mechanism rather than an explicit authority structure.
Google was tremendously successful during this engineering-led period, which stands as direct evidence against the idea that product-ledness is a prerequisite for either user focus or business success. See "Product Led" Is Not the Goal — Product and Business Success Is.
The material separately notes Google is seen as having lost its product-and-user focus later in its journey — framed as independent of any shift in PM authority.
Doshi flags a caveat even to this positive example: Google later lost its product-and-user focus, which he raises as a reminder that a company's product culture can erode over time independent of whether it was ever PM led in the first place. Being engineering led didn't inoculate it against drift.
Cagan attributes Google's perceived (and, in his view, undeserved) reputation for narrow success largely to AdWords' outsized public profile, which overshadows roughly eight other Google services each with over a billion users.
Be wary of judging a company's product breadth by its most famous product — the visible success may be masking a much wider base of quietly successful ones.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model