Making hardware runs counter to Google’s entire corporate culture. The company shuns process and management, two things a hardware maker can’t do without.
For the new hardware team, the task was clear: Find more ways to get Google Assistant in front of people and build a sustainable business around it
Osterloh centralized all that hardware under his leadership, giving 55 percent of those 1,000 employees a new manager. Rather than having an executive in charge of each product, Osterloh chose to implement a “functional” structure, giving his leaders oversight of a larger segment of the Google hardware organization. Ivy Ross, formerly head of Google Glass, was put in charge of all hardware design. Mario Queiroz ran product management. Ana Corrales, a longtime manufacturing exec and Nest’s CFO and COO, was tapped to oversee all things operations and supply chain. The team began to centralize their planning and forecasting, and to streamline their conversations with suppliers. They made five-year plans, which were anathema to Google.
Ship and Iterate simply doesn’t work with hardware. A single tweak can cost weeks and millions of dollars. Every small change ripples through the entire supply chain, changing vendor timelines, requiring new tools, and slowing everything down. If one part is late, you’ll miss your ship date, and it’s not like you can move Black Friday. Oh, you want 50 percent more product than you thought? You’ll get it in six months if you’re lucky. There is no bending the hardware world to your whim.
He went through every hardware initiative at Google, choosing which to continue and which to wind down. None of the decisions was easy, Osterloh says, but two were particularly hard. He’d been around the Ara modular phone project since its beginnings at Motorola and believed fully in its mission: to build a $50 phone with upgradeable parts, which could last longer and be greener than any other device. Yet the device ended up being less modular and more expensive than anyone wanted. “So it was rather like every other phone, except there was an ability to add up to six or so modules to the back,” Osterloh says. He wanted to build one phone, not many, so he shut Ara down.
With Google Glass, too, Osterloh understood the vision but couldn’t figure out how to achieve it quickly. He ticks off the things you’d need to make a great face-worn augmented-reality device that aren’t yet possible: longer-lasting batteries in smaller packages, faster processors that generate less heat, and a populace ready to use such devices. “In the long run, this is going to be a key part of what we do,” he says. “But the timing is a key uncertainty.” In the meantime, Osterloh re-released Glass as an enterprise tool, where it found a surprising niche with factory workers and warehouse employees.
While he was re-writing org charts and culling product lines, Osterloh had also been working with the higher-ups at Google to figure out what, exactly, Google’s hardware strategy should entail. They coined platitudes like “radical helpfulness” and sought ways to communicate humanity and approachability, but mostly they focused on three words, in a very specific order: AI, software, hardware
Osterloh decided to flank the Pixel effort with other devices that were good matches for Assistant. Another team within Google had in the past released two terrific laptops, called Chromebook Pixel, that only saw limited commercial success. Osterloh told the team to go build something even lighter, thinner, and better—and to integrate Assistant. They decided to call it Pixelbook and set off on their way. A different group started working on headphones they called Pixel Buds that would provide access to Assistant without the need for a phone. The Google Home team and the Chromecast crew were also part of the push.
“Eventually, it will be the case that users probably have a constellation of devices to get things done,” Osterloh says.