Vast majority of people are working on building some feature functionality or enhancing an underlying system infra for more scale or performance or such non-functional capability which they genuinely think will improve user experience and hence make users prefer to use their product more than anything else.
People didn't focus on business metrics (most people don't know what they are) – this was most disorienting for me. It took me sometime to understand the luxury provided by strong margin business that is google ads which allows you gloss over short-term inefficiencies while exploring new product spaces.
It is assumed monetization in the form of ads or subscription can be done if there is strong user engagement for the product and that revenue vs cost equation will work out. (If not, they kill it, which they do badly). Another culture at Google is people are openly critical of their product in very large internal discussion forums.