Anurag Agarwal, VP of Engineering at Google Workspace, oversees major products like Gmail and Drive with over 18 years at Google. He discusses how AI is transforming product development, emphasizing speed and clear goals. Anurag shares strategies for effective team decision-making, stressing transparency and collaboration. He highlights the importance of user-centric approaches in refining functionalities and cultivating a no-blame culture to foster innovation. The conversation also touches on futuristic workflows shaped by new technologies and deeper human connections.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Faster Iteration and Execution
Align on clear goals and let teams innovate within that framework.
Understand bottlenecks and automate or skip steps to increase efficiency.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Prioritization and Vision
Prioritize problems based on effort and potential payoff, considering both high-impact, high-cost and low-cost, quick-impact work.
Focus on user journeys and how AI can improve them.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Streamlining Decision-Making
Include decision-makers in daily stand-up meetings to provide context and streamline decisions.
For complex decisions, ensure the right experts are in the room and encourage feedback.
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The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
David Brooks
David Brooks's "How to Know a Person" delves into the complexities of human relationships, exploring how we perceive and understand others. The book emphasizes the importance of empathy, active listening, and self-awareness in building meaningful connections. Brooks challenges readers to move beyond superficial judgments and embrace a deeper understanding of themselves and those around them. He argues that true connection requires vulnerability and a willingness to be seen authentically. Ultimately, the book offers a practical guide to fostering richer, more fulfilling relationships.
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.
SHOW NOTES:
A current update on Google Workspace (2:46)
Strategies for getting teams to faster iteration & execution (4:41)
Prioritizing the right problems & how to set a unified vision to work toward (7:11)
Questions to ask to help rationalize during prioritization conversations (10:48)
Components of streamlining the decision-making process (13:33)
Anurag’s recommendations for facilitating decision-making conversations (15:00)
How to encourage your team to ask the right questions & push back (16:55)
Frameworks for identifying areas of inefficiency / friction (20:17)
Steps for increasing confidence on the front end for an AI product experience (23:38)
Filtering insights for faster iteration on AI product concepts (25:59)
Measure user impact & make adjustments quickly based on that feedback (27:38)
Reducing barriers to feature discovery (29:33)
Enabling discovery & engagement of new product experiences (32:05)
The role of pilots when testing different product experience changes (35:17)
The future product launches Anurag is most excited (39:10)
Rapid fire questions (40:36)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Google AI is now included, with no add-ons required or usage limits, in Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. Find out more: https://goo.gle/3PsIwf1
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen - Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, David Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to helping readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.
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