A Day in My Life at Google (8 years in)

Can I just say that I am so excited to work unpaid on this 20% project and help invent the next Gmail. Thank you. So, after months of research, I've come up with a bold new strategy to maximize stakeholder value. It's a little bit out there, but bear with me. More ads. Thank you. Thank you. It was a team effort. I think we need to revisit the client engagement strategy because the numbers seem to mask a deeper issue around user fatigue and content redundancy. True. Although I'd argue the decline in interaction rates is more closely tied to the delayed roll out of the health. Where you going? Where's he going? Excuse me. Jeff, excuse me. All right.

Whatever skit I did just now, it was just a joke. Please don't fire me. Unless the skit was about ads, in which case I was only half joking. Um, it's 7:30 a. m. in the morning and the office is completely empty. Um, I like to start early so I can leave early and this way I can work without interruptions for a couple hours before people start getting in at like 9:30 or 10. Some of you

already know this, but I'm a product marketing manager PMM at Google and basically my job is to take a Google product, for example, Gemini, and drive adoption in my local market. But what exactly does that mean? For context, within the broader marketing organization, we have PMMs at the global level, the regional level, for example, America's APAC, AMIA, and the local market level, for example, greater China, Japan, Singapore. This is going to be a massive oversimplification, but global PMM are usually responsible for working with the product teams and announcing new product features. For example, Gemini now has deep research and Chach copied us. Just kidding. I added that last part in, but we did launch deep research first for the record. Um, and they're also responsible for setting targets for each local market. For example, um, this year we're looking to increase MAU monthly active users by 20% in the Singapore market. And then local marketing managers like myself do the actual work. Work work. Just kidding. I really appreciate my global counterparts. Please don't increase my targets again. Jokes aside, I do think local marketers have the most fun because we get a lot of autonomy. For example, to increase monthly active users, I can choose to either focus on acquiring new users or focus on retaining existing ones. And the marketing campaigns I'd run would depend on the objective. For example, if I were to focus on acquisition this year, uh an oversimplified campaign launch process would look something like this. First, I'd identify the opportunity or headroom. So Singapore has a population of 6 million. And assuming 50% of those people can but are not using AI tools. That's a potential 3 million users for Google Gemini. This number is important to calculate upfront because it tells me how many people I can reach in this market, enabling me to set realistic goals for my campaigns. Next, target audience. Since my time and budget are limited, uh I have to focus on the lowhanging fruits by identifying subsegments of the 3 million. And let's say I go with students because as you all know, it's best to get them hooked at a young age. Finally, we get to the tactics, aka the actual campaign ideas. This could be something super simple like running a Gemini workshop for students or something really complicated like developing a 30-day Gemini challenge. For the Gemini challenge, I would probably need to involve PR, legal, request for more budget, and work overtime. Whereas for the workshop, it's basically event management. I invite a couple of speakers, send out some invitations, and set up Google Meet. So, how do I decide which one of these campaigns to run? There's actually a super simple guideline. Listen up because they're not teaching you this stuff in college. If you're up for promotion, go with the hard option. If you just got promoted, go with the easy option. That was obviously a joke. I never go with the hard option. Okay, I need to get some work done now, but quick plug, you can join my free newsletter if you want to receive an insanely actionable Google Workspace tip every week. I'll leave a link down below.

All right, we're back. Lunchtime. Uh, some of you asked about the food here. It's free, so by default, it's amazing. Uh, in this office we have a salad station, a Chinese station, which is my personal favorite, a western/fusion station, and a dessert station. Was that too cringe? Okay. Um, a lot of you sent in questions on Instagram, so I'd go through some of these while I eat. First

off, how much I make. I bet you thought I wasn't going to answer this, but right now I'm making a little over $11,000 a month before tax, not including my equity and bonus. I just don't have those numbers off the top of my head right now. Um, Asian markets have relatively lower pay, so my peers in the US and Western Europe uh are earning more and software engineers earn a lot

more. What's the most inappropriate thing I've done in the office? Using ChatBT inside of Google Gemini. How do I

have time to be a YouTuber while I have a full-time job? Uh, to be honest, I just don't have much of a personal life outside of working YouTube. Um, I work 80 90 hour weeks. I don't usually have free time on weekends. I'm not trying to glamorize this or anything. Um, it's just the reality and something I personally chose to do because I want to build economic security when I'm still, you know, relatively young. How intense

do people work during working hours? The vibes in the office. Um, so again, it's all relative. I don't want to piss off my colleagues in the States, but uh the working culture on average in Asia is more intense, right? We work overtime pretty regularly, I would say. But again, compared to like Chinese companies like Tencent by Dans and PDD Pandora whose employees work on Saturdays, like we have it pretty chill. I do have a lot of colleagues who join from those Chinese firms and they tell me their biggest culture shock is that Google is super collaborative. Like they were surprised that their Google colleagues actually want to help them achieve their work goals. So I guess they come from a very cutthroat and backstabby culture. um how to get a job

at Google. Um I'm actually interviewing a candidate later this afternoon so I can share a few tip and tricks. Then my

daily routine. I'm creating an entire video on how I structure my day and week. So stay subscribed for that. And it's filling up. So I'm actually just going to finish eating cuz I'm feeling a little bit self-conscious right now. And I'll see you back in the meeting room. I

have backto-back meetings this afternoon. But I want to share a quick project management tip I picked up during my time at Google. Basically, every project requires three essential documents and each serve a very specific purpose. First, project notes. All project related discussions, decisions, and history are captured here. This includes notes from project meetings, random messages from colleagues, and ideas from team members. And I know this is a weird way to think about it, but in my mind, the audience for this document is the project owner only because no one else would care about that level of detail. Second, working spreadsheet or working tricks as Googlers like to call it. This is the central collaboration hub for the core project team. There's a clear timeline of key milestones. Action items are assigned here and includes key resources like presentation links and the audience for this document is the core project team since the entire team needs to contribute to the spreadsheet. Third, briefing slides. This provides a highlevel visual overview for stakeholders outside the core team like senior leadership. They don't care about the operational details from the project notes and working tricks, right? So a good project owner would always use slides to present key status updates in an easy to understand format. So if I were the project owner, the way I would think about it is the project notes is for myself, the working spreadsheet is for the core project team and the briefing slides is for everyone else. and I would prepare those documents with those target audiences in mind. Anyways, I'm about to head into my first meeting of the afternoon. I'll see you in a bit. Many hours later. Okay, it's like 5:00

p. m. I'm really tired. I was in like four backtoback meetings. I just finished interviewing a candidate, so I thought I'd wrap up by sharing some tips and tricks for non-technical interviews. First, and all this is public information, I'll leave the links down below. Interviewers measure candidates based on four key attributes. Number one, general cognitive ability, GCA. Number two, role related knowledge, RRK, googliness, and leadership. GCA is where I think most people get tripped up. So, the one pro tip I have for you here is to prepare using case interview questions found in consulting interviews since the approach to both is very similar. For example, if the question is, profits for company A dropped by 20% year-on-year. Why? The point is not the final answer because there is no right answer but rather it's your thought process. For example, profits can be broken down to revenue minus cost. So either your revenue went down or your cost went up or a combination of both. And revenue can be further broken down into price per product times number of products sold and so on and so forth. You can keep drilling down to figure out the root problem. come up with hypotheses to test to see if it's a revenue problem, a cost problem, a combination of both that's ultimately contributing to the profits being down overall. I personally use Victor Chang's case interview secrets to prepare back in the day, but I think there's also another really popular book called case and point I think. Second, and this is straight from Google's career website, use the XYZ bullet point structure in your resumes. For example, instead of saying, "I designed a new onboarding process to increase customer satisfaction," we would write increase customer satisfaction accomplish by 22% in 3 months as measured by Y through designing a new onboarding process by doing Z. And you want to apply this XYZ framework to every single bullet point on your resume. If you want more information about this, watch my resume video next. Third, and I promise this is not a sponsor segment, but I strongly recommend using Google's interview warm-up tool to prepare for your interviews. You basically choose the type of role you're interviewing for, and the tool will actually have a mock interview with you using industry specific questions, and you can even see examples of a strong answer. Alternatively, you can use the live version of Cash Google Gemini. What's chach? You can use a live version of Google Gemini to roleplay the part of the interviewer to build confidence before the actual interview. Great. Let's get started. First, tell me about your experience managing projects, especially in a tech environment. All

right, I'm on my way back home. I just finished a quick workout. It's so convenient to have the gym in the office. Definitely one of the most underrated perks here. I hope you enjoyed this day in the life. I know it wasn't like one of my usual videos, so let me know what you think. Drop any questions you have down below. And as usual, have a great one.