Collaboration & Innovation in the Time of AI w/ Anurag Agarwal & Lizzie Matusov #193
The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Navigating Early-Stage Engineering and Ethical AI Practices
This chapter delves into the collaborative and innovative environment of early-stage tech companies in the age of AI. It emphasizes the balance between team autonomy and the integration of QA processes, alongside discussions on the ethical use of AI and evolving development practices.
We’re back with another session from ELC Annual 2024! This episode features an engaging session on collaboration & innovation in the time of AI with Anurag Agarwal, VPE, Google Workspace @ Google, and Lizzie Matusov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Quotient! In this conversation, they dissect how AI is transforming not only the products engineering teams are building but also how teams work together internally. They cover how Google / Google Workplace specifically use AI both internally & externally, strategies for creating & maintaining alignment across a large org, how Anurag addressed challenges during this transitional period, and more.
ABOUT ANURAG AGARWAL
Anurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create and build together.
With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information.
Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family.
" One of the things we sort of tried to do from very early on is to make sure teams see their success in terms of overall workspace success, in terms of more users actually being able to accomplish their work more effectively using all of Workspace's tools, right? It's not about the individual tools, it's really about the whole together.”
- Anurag Agarwal
ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV
Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.
SHOW NOTES:
- Anurag’s career at Google & what he’s currently working on (2:38)
- The evolution of Google Workspace & incorporating GenAI (4:31)
- Diving into internal AI use within Google / across teams (6:37)
- Challenges faced while creating alignment (9:47)
- Frameworks for setting goals & aligning KPIs more effectively (11:57)
- How Google ensures its team feel safe to fail & allow autonomy (14:03)
- Strategies for maintaining alignment across a large org (16:09)
- How Anurag’s leadership has evolved through technology transformations (18:07)
- Strategies for helping teams accomplish tasks & be continuously learning (20:33)
- Anurag’s favorite rituals / changes from this transition (24:09)
- Audience Q&A: What has been your biggest challenge shipping AI? (25:26)
- Defining Workspace’s corpus for the individual vs. the enterprise (27:29)
- How do you ensure content moderation when using AI features? (28:13)
- Build guardrails for LLMs depending on the context (29:18)
- How the center of excellence team distributed its knowledge across various orgs (30:48)
- Strategies for drawing a line where Gemini responds & ensuring determinism in the response (32:15)
- Quotient’s processes for QA & automation (34:02)
- Understanding the ethics / responsibilities behind AI usage (35:11)
- The evolution of developmental practices with deterministic code vs. apps written with AI (36:43)
- Anurag & Lizzie’s key takeaways (38:28)
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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