#35: Explore Wide and Innovative Spaces at Google with Stefan Schnabl
Oct 25, 2023
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Stefan Schnabl, a senior product manager at Google, shares insights about working in the education space. He discusses aligning on direction, research and experimentation, and identifying strong opportunities. The podcast explores challenges in creating a strategy for learning, evaluating automation, formulating and communicating a product strategy, and driving change with empathy. It also touches upon change management and insights shared by the guest on LinkedIn and his blog.
Identifying new strategic approaches and focusing on a larger user base for disproportionate success.
Developing a framework called Pilots for rapid iterative product discovery and tracking progress of pilot programs.
Deep dives
Introduction and Background
In this podcast episode, Nachosino interviews Stefan Schnabel, a senior product manager at Google, about his background and experience. Stefan discusses his role at Google and his work in various product areas such as Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search, and Google's hardware products. He also shares his transition into the field of education, which presented new strategic challenges. The team had to rethink their approach and develop a new strategy that would leverage Google's scalable software products in the education sector.
Defining the Problem Space and Strategy
Stefan explains how his team focused on helping professional individuals learn within Google's tech workforce. They had to identify where software could effectively support education in a scalable way, and this required a net new strategy. The team had to rethink their traditional strategic approaches and find a new way to serve a larger user base with a small team, aiming for disproportionate success. They also had to align their strategy with Google's larger educational efforts, define their specific space within the education sector, and choose the most impactful learning journeys to focus on.
Creating a Framework for Pilot Programs
The team developed a framework called Pilots to guide their rapid iterative product discovery strategy. They operated with pace and precision, using phases to move from broad ideation to structured research and evidence of value. They also established a rubric for evaluation, considering factors such as value per user, total addressable market, and the ability to automate or programmatically serve the learning needs. The team created artifacts such as product strategy documents, decks, templates, and scoring systems to communicate the strategy and track the progress of pilot programs.
Expanding and Evolving the Strategy
The initial strategy focused on a narrow circle of developers within Google's tech workforce. However, over time, the team expanded the strategy to include other roles and areas, such as technical writers and content creators. They empowered the teams to create their own derivatives of the strategy and apply it to their specific spaces. The strategy evolved as the teams discovered evidence of value and graduated their pilots into core products, which received long-term funding. The team also learned the importance of separating personal reactions to change from the actual impact of the strategy, allowing them to be more empathetic and supportive during the transition.
Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide.
As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions.
In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions.
He shared many tips and stories, from how they align on direction down to how the team does research and experimentation in the space to identify strong opportunities.