Being a product manager at Google is a really highly
leveraged job.
And when I say highly leveraged, I mean you can turn
one little knob and get a huge amount of lift.
One of the projects I worked on was the Google Pack.
And when I came in as a brand new product manager, I didn't
know much about what to do with that particular product.
But over time I started looking at our metrics, and I
didn't think our conversion was too good on the website.
That means that not that many people were coming from the
homepage and downloading the product.
So I sat down with an engineer and a UX designer and I said,
how can we make this better?
And we came up with some ideas.
And we took those ideas and we showed them around and people
said, well, I don't know.
And then we got some positive feedback from other people,
and they said, yeah, this is interesting.
This is good.
And we went and we shipped it.
And we had a huge impact on the website.
And you can see it.
We shipped a new pack.google.com homepage.
And the big thing here is that I didn't go to my manager.
And I didn't go to Larry and Sergey and Eric,
who are great guys.
Instead, I went, and I went to an engineer and a designer,
and we made it happen.
And when we shipped it, we changed the lives for hundreds
of thousands of users.
And we got hundreds of thousands more downloads.
It's that sort of small change that you can make really
quickly at Google that makes showing
up incredibly valuable.
My name is Chris Vandermay.
I'm a product manager and I work at Google Seattle.
