Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil,” but it may as well be “What, me worry?” While the bulk of the world’s tech startups and tech giants all have to worry about things like user retention, competition, and market share, Google’s core products – YouTube, Android, and Search – are already so ubiquitous that getting people on the internet is enough to ensure that the company stays afloat. Luckily for Google, more and more people around the world will have easier access to the internet thanks to the surge of affordable smartphones hitting the market. Since many of these smartphone owners will be using their devices as their primary means of going online, it’s in Google’s best interest to make sure it can influence their habits and place its properties front-and-center.
In an effort to learn more about how Google’s product and engineering teams in Asia balance their loyalty to Mountain View with the needs of diverse emerging economies, Tech in Asia sat down with Andrew McGlinchey, product manager for Google in Southeast Asia, to discuss the power of platforms, getting app developers paid, and why Inbox is overrated. Below is an edited transcript of our interview.
TiA: How would you describe your day-to-day role as product manager for Southeast Asia at Google?
McGlinchey: Traditional product managers at Google have a product and that’s their thing – for example, a spam-fighting tool for YouTube. I’m a regional product manager, so that means that I look across many different products and figure out what’s missing, and then illustrate – sometimes lobby – to get the right things launched at the right time. Sometimes you corral the local resources to get them to launch well.
A good example is direct carrier billing. There’s a business development team and a standard tool set for implementing this, but sometimes there’s a special tax system or currency regulation in a given country – things that the original product team may have never thought of team when they were building the system. So we have to chase and prioritize to make sure the system accommodates these cases, so we can launch our products in the next place.
You discussed in your keynote how Google is working to improve “internet accessibility” in APAC. What is Google gaining from all of its efforts to increase internet accesibility in Asia?
Google is weird. It’s a nice thing that we don’t feel like we have to explain to shareholders where the internet users in Cambodia are. We figure that if the internet is healthy, then Google is healthy. We’ve seen this in other parts of the world, like Western Europe, which were once new frontiers and are now robust, thriving internet communities.
How might the implications of ‘What’s good for the internet is good for Google’ be different now than it was ten years ago?
It’s different now than ten years ago because people are joining the internet in an era where Facebook is the first thing you do when you go on the internet, and your mobile phone is the tool you use to access the internet. The internet used to mean websites. Now it means apps and mobile services. Android is a super accessible platform, and the more accessible we make that, the more people benefit. The Google Play store and YouTube are two other examples of powerful platforms. There are great examples of local creators telling their stories and selling their businesses on YouTube.
As someone whose job involves batting for Asia, what are some recurring themes as you communicate with your colleagues in Mountain View?
The basic format for Google product rollouts is you launch in the biggest markets first and then prioritize down the line. But sometimes it gets complicated because you’ll say “It’s this size now, but look at the future.” A couple years ago, that was my job – I’d say, for example, “Look at Indonesia’s potential.” Now I say, “Look at how big Indonesia is.”
In general, first you launch in the US, then it’s easy to launch in Australia and the UK, and then you stick it in France and Germany and it all works. Then when you get to India, you think “Oh wait… we didn’t think about this the right way.” But we’re starting to get better at this now. Three years ago, were I to be a bit uncharitable, we might have said “Wow, networks are really bad in India, how do I ruin my product to get it to work in India?” Now it’s like, “This is what the reality is – people don’t have credit cards, and people use inexpensive mobile phones, so we can’t anticipate tons of computing power. Internet connections are slow and unreliable, and customers are price sensitive towards them. Let’s build for that.” More and more, we’re building from the ground up rather than retrofitting existing stuff. Asia is leading that in many ways, but it also matters for Brazil, Mexico, and a lot of other different places.
How the conversation goes when arguing with Mountain View is, principally, the core teams want to do the right thing, but it can be confusing for them. If I’m the main guy for direct carrier billing, the Russia product manager will tell me something, and then the Middle East team will tell me something, and then the core product team will then have to prioritize. Sometimes it’s about revenue, sometimes it’s about impacting users, sometimes it’s about growth.
Where does something like carrier billing fit into those categories of prioritization?
It’s probably first about potential revenue, and then it’s about stimulating the ecosystem. If people are just going to go and buy something from Clash of the Clans or Line, we’re happy with that. But it’s even better if an Indonesian person can make an app that’s useful for Indonesians. If Indonesians have trouble paying for it, what’s in it for him?
Can you think of any other products or services that in your mind have been driven by Asia? Have you ever found that it’s been difficult to communicate a particular product’s importance to a team at Mountain View, who might be holding the keys?
Google Map Maker originated in India as something that was trying to solve a very specific problem in India. In a lot of the Western world, you could just license maps. [For emerging markets], the Mountain View idea at the time was sort of “Well, send the business team out over there and we’ll buy a map.” Of course, there is no map. There’s also legal questions – sometimes existing maps are military-grade, or there’s some sensitivity over copyrights. So this was a very Asia specific problem that was solved by engineers in Asia. With a mixture of trace-over satellites and community editing that lets people name roads and add buildings, a lot of Google Maps in India and Africa has been built out of Map Maker. Now that same product can be used to edit a new road that appears in Austin, Texas.
You mentioned on stage that before Google’s Android achieved popularity, there was sort of a Galapagos effect among mobile internet companies, wherein markets like Korea, Japan, and India each had their own leading players and services. Google, meanwhile, has always been a unifying force for the global internet. As internet ecosystems in emerging APAC markets mature, do you foresee a Galapagos effect occuring among Google’s products, services, and properties? Will Google evolve differently in Indonesia than from India, for example?
I doubt it, a bit, just because Google’s general engineering principles are to make something once, and then change it market by market with engineering, based on data. But we’ve gone down this road in the past. For example, on the Google homepage in Korea, we had some pictures that used to show you how to search. This was because at the time, Naver’s homepage had a lot of stuff on it. We also once tried an India-specific service that was sort of an SMS channel. But in the end, if you make good platforms that are generic, people will respond.
Every country thinks that they’re special. Indonesians will say they love social media, and Filipinos will say they love social media, but everyone loves social media. We’re all the same people.
How do you prioritize Asia-specific initiatives at Google?
Well, there are multiple battles that I could fight. Google could slice things by countries or by products. Right now, it’s product teams that makes products. There’s a team that works on Chromecast, and then there’s another team that does something else. Sometimes they’re brand new and have an aggressive rollout schedule, sometimes they’re mature and have time to be careful about the next country they’ll roll out into. So for me, when looking at which product to launch where, I have to ask myself: “What matters?”
My themes are basically anything that makes the Android ecosystem work; entertainment stuff, because most users in emerging markets are young; and small-and-medium sized businesses, because the nature of economies in most emerging markets is from smaller guys. We need to make sure these guys are findable on Maps and searchable. We need to help them get advertising.
Can you give an example of something that doesn’t fit into these categories, and therefore isn’t as big a priority in Asia as it might be elsewhere?
Well, the new Inbox email system for Gmail – cool! That’s awesome for people who care. But for the average guy, new and better email is like new and better fax.
Is that seen as a high stakes product in the US?
I’d say yes. Making email more efficient and more mobile focused is a big deal.
Another example of something I wouldn’t chase down is Play Books and Play Music. It seems like that would be a big deal, but the fact is that YouTube is better because it’s free. It would be great to tell people in emerging markets how to pay for content. But for me, I have to compete with piracy. That’s my challenge. Of course, we want to get consumers over the idea that it’s difficult or expensive to buy media online. But it’s not a priority for us because it’s not going to earn us a lot of money and it’s still the early days. I’d much rather get anything that can get YouTube downloads faster. That will help capture people’s hearts and minds as they come online. Making a few more bucks out of existing users can wait.
Editing by Steven Millward; top image via Flickr user Ajith Kumar
This post Google’s lead APAC product manager on picking one’s battles in Asia appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Google’s lead APAC product manager on picking one’s battles in Asia
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