Product Learnings from Google I/O '22

Full video of Google I/O 2002 – May 2022

Google I/O is Pure Gold For Product People to Learn From

Google I/O is packed with lots of key learnings to take away around Data-oriented content, Storytelling, Real-life use cases, long-term thinking, thinking for scale, impact on the ecosystem, and making a big difference for humankind. It’s not just a product-focused feature presentation but how Google is helping solve more significant problems of the world today and how their solutions work.

This article tries to cover each item and map it to Product learning.

Note: This article is NOT about what was launched and the feature set, but it’s about Product Management learnings that anyone can derive by watching the Google I/O 2022.

About The Annoucement

Google I/O is an annual event from Google and was broadcasted on 11th May, 2022. A host of updates on each major product ranging from Search, YouTube, Maps, Pixel hardware, Android, and Security, were covered in 2 hour-long live presentations on YouTube. A jam-packed feature-rich announcements mapping to real-life problems that Google is trying to address. Pretty exciting and engaging event to watch for any Product Person.

The Target Audience for Google I/O

Google I/O is a general marketing event to launch and announce what Google has been working on and what’s coming. It’s targeted at users, Product people, Engineers, Partners, prospective users, and the broader market. Millions of people watch it live on YouTube.

Data-Driven Presentation

Every point that Google wants you to register and understand the impact is backed with data. Here are some examples that I noted.

2 Billion times Google helped people to find the COVID vaccine in the past year
23 Million people got a flood alert from Google
1.6 Billion buildings & 60 Million KM of the road were mapped on Google Map
500M users already use their end-to-end SMS (RCS) service

Learnings:

Define what success looks like by setting data-driven goals (KPI).
Measure them over time by keeping the investment on.
Make these KPIs part of your story to excite your team, partners, and the world.

Use Cases That Demonstrate Google Is Solving Real Problems.

Breakthroughs like this are powering a radical shift in how we access knowlege and use computing
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

Multisearch to let users decide how they want to search using different input forms. They are making it more natural to search rather than just text or voice-based search.
Ecofriendly routing of cars to save fuel and reduce carbon emission
Massive time-saving enhancements in the workspace to summarize documents, highlight key events in chats and meetings
Tools for YouTubers to auto-create chapters and provide auto-translation and transcripts in multiple languages. Making valuable content easily accessible and widely viewed without language barriers.
LaMBDA2 – Imagine It, Talk it and List it. Three breakthroughs in AI go beyond search to help us get our research or everyday work done.

Learnings:

Go for big things that will matter over time for people
Understand what core problems people are facing and how new technology can help

Long Term Thinking & Vision

Five themes that immerge around long term thinking at Google I/O –

Make knowledge accessible to the world easily
Make technology that is affordable to everyone
Searching in a natural way
Saving people’s time, and money, bringing convenience and being eco-friendly.
Caring for people’s diversity, privacy, and security

Learnings:

Go beyond products and features to demonstrate that you care for people & ecosystem.
Think of use cases that impact the user in a way to save money, time, and efforts to improve privacy & security, value their diversity, and then work backward to see what features can solve it.

Storytelling

Three stories from Google I/O that touched me –

Your visit to London, searching for places, restaurants, and immersive inside view of the restaurant using drones.
Detects accidents and raises it as an emergency to call friends and 911. Saving lives.
Mother and Daughter communication using Google Translate and transcript

Learnings:

Bring real-life use cases that your product solves, present them in a way that people would like to watch and listen
Make your long presentation enjoyable by bringing real stories spaced between the technical content.

The Scale of Impact & Deep Sense of Responsibility

Google is big, and whatever they do impacts billions of users daily. This scale and impact bring in colossal responsibility to drive the right things and care a lot for varied users.

Some examples of scale that were quoted

Safe browsing is protecting 5 Billion devices from phishing and online fraud
700M people get their tasks done via Google Assistance
1 Billion new Android devices registered
Eco-friendly routes saved carbon footprint equivalent to taking down 100K cars from the road.
Trillions of search queries are made every year

Learnings:

Scale brings in a wider set of problems to solve for a product. Privacy, Security, Inclusiveness, impact on the ecosystem, accessibility, language support, affordability by a wider audience, and the responsibility of getting the tech right to not get exploited inadvisable ways.

Pixel Ecosystem & Matter Platform

We saw launch and enhancements to Pixel phones, Pixel buds, Pixel Tablet & Pixel watch. An entire series of digital accessories gives you convenience, best interoperability, best hardware, and long-term support to ensure it’s all going to work and help you solve whatever you are trying to do as a user. It’s a significant promise and Google is delivering it today!

All of these work perfectly with Android 13, your TV, your IoT devices, home automation, payment systems, and more on a newly built platform named ‘Matter.’

It showcases that someone at Google is thinking deeply about the cohesive platform they are building to make people’s lives easy. Putting this as a strategy and executing it across multiple teams, multiple partners, and geolocations is just a mammoth amount of work that Google is delivering.

Learnings:

You can have multiple products at your company. However, if they don’t work well together cohesively, you have failed as a company.
Bring in the use case to tie the products together and showcase how they work well.

Focus on Privacy and Security – “Safer with Google”

“Even as technology grows increasingly complex, we keep more people safe online than anyone else in the world”
Jan Fitzpatrick

Google has access to a lot of data through its OS and products. People are concerned over how their data is used against them. A lot of privacy concerns are raised on a consistent basis against Google. Google not only acknowledged it but has taken concrete steps over the years to drive the initiative ‘Safer with Google’. This promises 3 key guidelines across the products Secure by Default, Private by Design, You’re in Control.

Google showcased a series of programs that are active to protect people from bad actors. A ten-minute-long presentation from Jan covers a wide array of initiatives around privacy and cybersecurity.

Learnings:

Privacy is a real threat and people are overly concerned about it as more and more data gets collected.
Companies need to lead here to show how well they care about users and their privacy
By just following three core security and privacy principles (listed above) from Google, companies can raise the bar high in protecting their users.

Inclusivity

Building for everyone is a core value at Google
Google Person

Google touches almost every one of us on this planet. Diversity is huge in terms of race, color, religion, beauty, language, culture, dressing, food habits, age, and more. You cannot build products that are biased toward one culture, or country and be called a global company.

One big initiative that Google showcased was Dr. Monk’s Skin tones. Long research-oriented 10 skin tones from Dr. Monk are now adopted by Google which is better than the industry standard. This is weaved in all major products at Google to define inclusivity when you search beauty, type an emoji, take a dark tone photo or edit your photos.

Learnings:

To be a global company targeting billions of people, you need to be sensitive about diversity and build products that bring inclusivity.

Solid Preparation

It’s a big event and from Google that millions of people watch. A lot to demonstrate and get the points across. Multiple people talk. Managing the transition. Bold statements, visual illustrations, demos, body language, tone, excitement, managing the pace, time awareness, and many more things. All of it can’t come easy and I sense a deep preparation and multiple rehearsals from Google. It all went so smooth, and kept the audience hooked for 2 hours! Just superb.

Summary

A fantastic presentation from Google to demonstrate their new products, services, enhancements, and roadmap. All of these are showcased with demos, real-life use cases, storytelling, touching spectators’ hearts, and generating lots of excitement. Each aspect was backed by data and scientific methods to achieve what they are going for—a strong projection of long-term thinking by the Google team. There is a lot to learn as a product person as you grow.

Kudos to Sundar Pichai and his team!