Google's CEO said it had cut managers, directors, and VPs by 10% as part of its efficiency drive.
The company has been boosting efficiency by reducing layers and reorganizing teams.
Google has been facing down threats from OpenAI and other AI rivals.
Google had cut the number of top management roles by 10% in its push for efficiency, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an all-hands meeting on Wednesday.
Pichai said that Google had made changes over the past couple of years to simplify the company and be more efficient, according to two people who heard the remarks, who asked to remain anonymous because they're not authorized to speak to the press.
Pichai said this had included a 10% reduction in managers, directors, and vice presidents, one source said.
A Google spokesperson said that some of the roles in that 10% figure were transitioned to individual contributor roles and that some were role eliminations.
The efficiency push has coincided with AI rivals such as OpenAI unleashing new products that threaten Google's search business.
Google has responded by injecting generative AI features into its core businesses and launching a flurry of new AI features, such as a new AI video generator beating OpenAI's in early testing and a new set of Gemini models, including a "reasoning" model that shows its thought process.
In Wednesday's all-hands meeting, Pichai also clarified the meaning of the word "Googleyness," telling staff that it needed updating for a modern Google.
Are you a current or former Google employee with something to share? You can reach the reporter Hugh Langley via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-628-228-1836) or email ([email protected]).
Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, California.
Jeff Chiu / AP Photo
In an all-hands, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the word 'Googleyness' had become too broad.
Pichai clarified what the word means for the company.
Now it's about being "Mission First" and being "Bold and Responsible."
"Googleyness" has long been a vague word for the search giant. Once used to determine if a candidate is a good fit for hiring, it has evolved in definition over the years.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai just attempted to clarify what the word means for Googlers now.
In a company all-hands meeting on Wednesday, Pichai told staff the definition of "Googleyness" had become too broad and that he felt obliged to clarify it, according to two employees who heard the remarks, who asked to remain anonymous because they're not authorized to speak to the press.
Pichai defined "Googleyness" as the following, per one of those sources:
"Mission First"
"Make Helpful Things"
"Be Bold & Responsible"
"Stay Scrappy"
"Hustle & Have Fun"
"Team Google"
A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
The term "Googleyness" has always been amorphous. In his 2015 book Work Rules, Google's former head of people operations, Laszlo Block, listed certain attributes that he considered "Googleyness," such as "intellectual humility," "enjoying fun," and "comfort with ambiguity."
The company previously changed its hiring guidelines to "avoid confusing Googleyness with culture fit," The Information reported in 2019. The change came after the company had been criticized for its lack of diversity in its workplace.
Are you a current or former Google employee with something to share? You can reach the reporter Hugh Langley via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-628-228-1836) or email ([email protected]).
Expect more tech titans to follow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was reportedly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump this week. I wouldn't be shocked to see a $1 million pledge coming shortly after. (Google declined to comment about any of the above.)
You can see it playing out in real time. Zuckerberg's initial donation was news; each subsequent one just confirms it as the cost of doing business. At some point, the news will be when you hear that some tech giant is not forking over $1 million to help fund Trump's multiday party next month.
Quick context: It is not unusual for big companies and very rich people to donate lots of money to presidential inaugurations, whether via cash, in-kind contributions, or both.
While US elections themselves have (some) rules about the amount of money people and companies can spend on candidates, there's no cap on what they can spend on inaugural committees. The only restrictions are that the money can't come from foreign nationals and that the donations eventually have to be disclosed.
It's also worth noting that the sums we are talking about here don't even qualify as rounding errors for companies this size. Zuckerberg's Meta makes about $174 million in profit every day. Amazon does about $110 million. A million bucks just doesn't register. (The Amazon and Meta donations are coming directly from the companies, not their founders; Altman, who has a reported net worth of $1.1 billion, has said he's making his donation personally.)
So what makes this round of donations newsworthy?
Yes, in some cases, Trump has tangled with the companies or the leaders in question — he famously threatened to jail Zuckerberg earlier this year for theoretical election interference, and he's long railed about Amazon's founder, Bezos, as well as the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
There's also the fact that while Trump and his allies continue to insist that they want to cut regulations, they also insist that they'll be cracking down on Big Tech. That context makes the donations seem even more transactional than other rich person/corporate donations.
But the main reason this is news is … because it's news. News that's out in public, that is.
In the past, these donations would eventually be disclosed in filings, but this time around, the contributors seem eager to let the world know they're doing it.
That's the telling part. The part that tells you that this time around, more tech leaders have decided that the best way to deal with Donald Trump is to say nice things about him in public, and to do nice things for him — in public. And then, they hope, they can get things from him privately.
CEOs and politicians weighed in on Elon Musk's role as a political advisor to president-elect Donald Trump.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Several of the world's power brokers gathered for a New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
While Elon Musk was not in attendance, he was the most-talked-about person there.
Here's what business leaders and politicians had to say about the richest person on Earth.
Several masters of the universe convened on Wednesday, and they had one name on their lips: Elon Musk.
At the annual New York Times DealBook Summit, the world's richest man was a topic of conversation among his fellow billionaires, CEOs, and political elite.
To be sure, Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook's founder and the day's MC, asked nearly all of his guests about Musk, who made headlines at the same summit last year for telling advertisers on X to "go fuck" themselves.
And while the Tesla CEO wasn't present this year, many conversations touched on his latest role. Over the past couple of months, Musk has become a political advisor and confidant to President-elect Donald Trump and one of his biggest donors, shelling out about $119 million to support his campaign.
The reaction to Musk's new role as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency ranged from cautiously optimistic to not giving a damn.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager and GOP donor, praised Musk's entrepreneurial ability.
"He runs Tesla, he runs SpaceX at a level of excellence that very few companies can even start to relate to," Griffin said.
At the same time, he questioned just how much Musk could impact federal spending.
"He's going to have to hit the hard reality, the hard truth, that making cuts of any form whatsoever will be politically very unpopular," Griffin said. "It'll be very hard to squeeze numbers in the trillions of dollars out of the baseline budget."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been embroiled in a personal and legal feud with Musk, similarly praised the Tesla CEO's business acumen.
"At a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously," Altman said of his OpenAI cofounder.
"It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses," Altman said. "It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself."
Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin is in direct competition with Musk's SpaceX, agreed that Musk's relationship with Trump was not that concerning.
"I take it face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors," Bezos said. "Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done above board in the public interest."
And Sundar Pichai, the Alphabet CEO, said Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company is a formidable competitor "given Elon's track record."
Those interviewed with actual political experience — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and former President Bill Clinton — appeared the most unfazed by Musk's new position of power.
Powell seemed confident in the independence of the Fed, even though Musk has signaled support for moving the central bank under the president's command.
And Clinton seemed to almost entirely brush off Musk's burgeoning influence — including the fact that he was on a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
"Trump's whole shtick is that all these rules and systems don't amount to anything," the former president said.
"Being the richest guy on Earth is far more important than anything else that you could be to him," Clinton added. "That's what he values. It's no big deal."
With his presidency approaching, tech leaders are seeking Donald Trump's good graces.
Mark Zuckerberg dined with him at Mar-a-Lago. TikTok's Shou Chew is reportedly chatting with Elon Musk.
From AI regulation to antitrust suits, there is a lot at stake.
From threatening to jail Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to accusing Google of rigging search results against him, President-elect Donald Trump tangled with Big Tech throughout his 2024 presidential campaign.
But with victory clenched — and tech luminary Elon Musk emerging as a key confidant — leaders throughout the industry have sought meetings and phone calls with the president-elect and those in his orbit in recent weeks.
There's a lot at stake. Trump's presidency could affect everything from budding AI regulation to a bevy of antitrust actions that target Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
"President Trump is surrounding himself with industry leaders like Elon Musk as he works to restore innovation, reduce regulation, and celebrate free speech in his second term," Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Brian Hughes told Business Insider in a statement.
With his second term approaching, these are some of the big-name tech executives who've been seeking the president-elect's ear.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before Thanksgiving.
David Zalubowski
Despite their thorny past, Zuckerberg — who didn't endorse a candidate in the 2024 election — met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for dinner on the evening before Thanksgiving, a Meta spokesperson previously confirmed to BI.
"It's an important time for the future of American Innovation," the spokesperson said.
Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said Tuesday that Zuckerberg wants to play "an active role" in future discussions with the Trump administration about US tech leadership, including in the "pivotal" field of artificial intelligence.
Clegg also said that Meta "overdid it" when moderating pandemic-related content in the past, for which the social network garnered heat on both sides of the political aisle.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Musk joined a congratulatory call between Pichai and Trump, The Information reported.
Google
In addition to his public congratulations, Google chief Sundar Pichai called the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory — with Musk joining the call, The Information reported.
When asked about Google's antitrust challenges earlier this year, Trump acknowledged the search giant "has a lot of power," but didn't say he favored a breakup.
"We want to have great companies," Trump said at the time. "We don't want China to have these companies."
TikTok CEO Shou Chew
Chew and Musk have discussed tech policy under Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Chew has known Musk for years and inquired broadly about the next administration's tech policies, the Journal reported.
Although he did not directly broach how to contend with a prospective TikTok ban, the Jounal reported that ByteDance execs are cautiously optimistic about TikTok's future in the US.
That said, the Journal reported that some intermediaries have been reluctant to pass on Altman's messages, given his tense relationship with Musk.
In addition to publicly congratulating the president-elect on X, Altman met with transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick in Palm Beach, according to the Journal, where he discussed how OpenAI would invest in US data centers and jobs. As Commerce Secretary, Lutnick would oversee the department charged with AI regulation.
Elle took a job in the tech industry about seven years ago, right when product management was "getting hot," she says. While the companies she's since worked for have had vastly different expectations of her, one thing has been consistent: clashes with other teams. Product managers serve as a bridge between engineers, salespeople, customer-service agents, and workers in other departments, and getting them to work together to build products that people actually need can be fractious.
"If you're an engineer and you have an idea, and then you have this outside figure come in and say, 'Why are you doing it this way?' — some can see that as great collaboration," says Elle, who asked that I use only her first name. "Other people are like, 'Whoa, you're slowing me down.'"
The product manager has become a powerful, highly paid, and polarizing figure. At some tech companies their colleagues refer to them, both affectionately and disparagingly, as "mini-CEOs" of the products they manage. Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and YouTube's Neal Mohan climbed their way up from product manager to CEO, and they deploy legions of PMs to help run their companies.
Coworkers don't always have fuzzy feelings about product managers. X abounds with snarky memes about their purposelessness, their illiteracy of Python and C++, their penchant for saying "no updates from me" in update meetings. On forums and subreddits, their more-technical colleagues belittle their work as fluff. "Is product manager the most useless role in tech?" an engineer posted on Blind. Another accused product managers of "stealing a living": "As an engineer, I feel I can easily do their job in addition to mine with not much extra effort," they wrote. One person on Reddit argued that product managers "just attend meetings and get paid more than the actual people doing the work."In a LinkedIn post titled "Product is too important. So we got rid of product managers," the founder of a digital banking startup wrote, "Any function that needs a decade to explain what it actually is or isn't doing is at very high risk of somehow being lost."
Several companies, from Airbnb to Snap, are now reconsidering the utility of product managers entirely, while others claim that the product manager's reign will only expand in the age of AI. How did a role that barely existed before the 2000s become one of the most influential and controversial presences in tech?
The seed of product management dates back to at least the 1930s, when Procter & Gamble created a position called the "brand man" whose job it was to understand customer problems. Inspired by this, Hewlett-Packard pioneered the tech product manager role in the 1960s. Microsoft began hiring what it called "program managers" in the 1980s. In the 2000s, as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon expanded to create ever more products, product managers proliferated. Hardware and software also became more complicated, and the engineers and developers building it had less time to figure out what was actually useful — companies realized they needed someone dedicated to translating customer needs.
Product became a path into tech for people with backgrounds in consulting or MBAs. A "golden era" of product management emerged in the run of zero interest rates in the 2010s. Companies gobbled up talent, sometimes hiring beyond their needs just to keep smart workers from going to competitors. Big Tech companies became bloated, paying middle managers high salaries to optimize products and development. Carnegie Mellon University began offering what it calls a first-of-its-kind master's degree in product management in 2018. The next year, U.S. News and World Report named product manager a top-five job for MBA grads.
"The shift in power moved from engineering to product managers," says Hubert Palan, the CEO of Productboard, a company that provides software for product managers. That's part of the friction: Those on the tech side often think the product manager doesn't understand how things work, but the product manager may think the engineers are building tools that people don't actually want or need, even if they're feats in coding.
"The product manager is at the center of everything," says Avi Siegel, a former product manager who's working on his own startup, Momentum. "If sales wants one thing and marketing wants one thing and customer success wants one thing, they disagree, and you can only choose one of the groups to side with — you're only going to keep one of those people happy."
"Product management is mostly necessary, but it can be done very badly," says Aaron, a software engineer who asked me to use only his first name. He says he's worked with both excellent and terrible product managers. At best, they bear the burden of understanding the tech a market needs. At worst, they don't acknowledge how technically difficult a solution they demand might be, which leads to ire, fatigue, and failure. "We would be asked for the moon with no collaboration," Aaron says.
Whether their coworkers are happy about it or not, product managers are gaining recognition. A 2007 study found that as the product-management role became more formalized at companies, projects were finished closer to deadlines and with more predictability. A 2020 report from McKinsey said that "creating a comprehensive product-management function" was one of the four most important things a company could do to grow its software business faster. According to ZipRecruiter, the average product manager in the US makes about $160,000. Software engineers, meanwhile, average about $147,000, and tech marketing specialists average about $87,000.
Product managers described the role to me as more intuitive and right-brained than left-brained (though there are plenty of technical PMs, many of them former engineers). The career site Zippia says the proportion of women working in product management rose to nearly 35% in 2021 from about 19% in 2010. That's compared to just 22% of all tech workers. Some women in product management I spoke to say part of the suspicion of their role's utility could be rooted in sexism. In 2022, two women who worked as product managers posted a TikTok explaining what they did for work, while they worked from a pool. The video drew hundreds of harsh comments. "Dealing with most product managers is a headache and a half and we usually hate talking to you," one person responded.
"Every woman that I've met with, if they're interested in a company, their first question is: Am I technical enough?" Elle says. "Every guy I've met, that question doesn't cross their mind." It makes her wonder if it's easier for men in product management to push back and say no to some ideas without looking like naysayers.
Empathy came up in every conversation I had for this story. Like a deft diplomat, a good product manager can empathize with the needs and concerns of every stakeholder, Palan says. Meg Watson, a product manager who has worked for Spotify and Stitch Fix, says product managers who try to rule with an iron fist "quickly learn that doesn't work." She describes working as a product manager as emotional and intense and says many of them experience the tension of their role daily. When she asks people looking for advice on getting into product management why they want to, they say they want power. "You will have power," Watson says. "You will also have accountability and pressure and stress."
And now some companies are ditching them. The Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky said last year that the company had combined the product-management function with product marketing. The rising call for executives to go "founder mode" — a concept touted by Chesky and coined by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham — has some questioning whether they should be delegating product decisions to product managers. A spokesperson for Snap told The Information last fall that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Smaller firms ponder the utility of bringing on product managers at all.
But others say the scope of product managers, though it may draw engineers' ire, is more likely to expand across the industry. "The future really does belong to product managers," says Frank Fusco, a product manager turned CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. As artificial intelligence gets more adept at coding, he says, some engineering tasks could become redundant — and that could be a boon for product managers. (Pichai, a former product manager, said last month that more than a quarter of Google's new code was created by AI.) Fusco says the AI boom is a classic product-manager problem: What do customers actually want the tech to do? As investors and executives are hungry for AI and many consumers are skeptical, Fusco predicts a rising demand for product managers to help bridge that gap.
"The revenge of the PMs is coming," he says. "I would expect to see PMs becoming more prestigious and empowered."
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
