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Comment by g15jv2dp | Hacker News Reader

Google is not a single person. Some manager or engineer at google thought, "how can I add the launch of a new product to my CV", cobbled this up, and someone in the hierarchy gave a green light. Six years later, someone else probably thought "this costs too much and doesn't improve the ad-money printing machine" so decided to shut it down.

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Or more charitably, someone thought "I wonder if users would like this feature", so shipped it to see, and then saw they didn't use it, so removed it to reduce complexity and move on to more important things.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but in my experience few are thinking just about their CV or promotions, and most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.

“improve offerings for users” without basing it on anything other than “let’s see if they like it” is CV development. It gives you an excuse to build something new rather than squeeze out a tiny performance gain in the money machine.

> most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.

The key is: "publicly, within the company"

Product Managers are only as great as the last new shiny product feature they deliver. This is a systematic problem for companies. Product Teams rarely prioritise fixing technical debt that is actually resulting in significant operational overhead. They prefer to focus on yet another shiny feature, as it is much easier to market.

"We need to spend some time fixing technical debt for the last product feature we rushed to market, as it generates too many support tickets."

versus

"We delivered dark mode. Shiny!"

I thought dark mode is the cover for "we fixed a load of bugs...and added CSS variables quickly to make a feature to announce".

This is Google. You need a major feature to get noticed and promoted. This feature was almost certainly shipped to ensure a pay rise/promotion for both the manager who delivered it and the manager who approved it. This was likely different in Google's early history. Unfortunately, this is how FAANGs and other large companies operate. You can only get promoted if you deliver something that convinces other managers in the company you deserve that promotion.

Pretty sure a product at this scale that required several XFN teams to execute on was not dreamt up by a couple people wanting a promotion.

This was a product that was meant to drive some KPI metric of some large organization, and it was launched with the full intention to drive it for years. Then when it wasn't meeting some target, instead of steering the ship in the right direction, the directors or VPs who funded the effort likely got bored and moved on to the next KPI.

I'm sure a lot of folks at the bottom worked very hard on it and were proud of it and definitely deserved the praise on their performance reviews. However, once it lost its director or VP support, there would have been no way to keep it running.

Did I say it's a single person? No. I said (implied) that it has an end game.

If you have no insight on Google internals, you really have nothing to reply to my question (as other's responses to your comment show).

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