Comment by pwg

Totally valid response :-) And I think that's another great angle as well that you can bring to a conundrum like Gmail or Google Search, like Time to Value or Engagement, etc.

As an extension, what we're seeing with OpenAi et al. is that they are capturing that attention and taking search with them. And so (as I referred to a couple comments down) OpenAI and the others are in the Google pre-2006 moment where the products are highly successfully engaging and grabbing our attention, but they haven't quite found the business model that prints money in the way Google Ads do.

So we'll see. What do you think?

This has got to be one of the most loaded question I have ever seen on here. Could you perhaps be clearer with what you want to ask? It sounds like you are insinuating that the guy is a bad person in some vague, nondescript way.

Yup, but my earlier comment was a bit flippant, so here’s a more in-depth response.

It was an answer to the OP’s question about why Gmail search feels broken, and a nod to the previous comment pointing out Google’s core business is selling ads. In that context, Gmail isn’t optimized for superior search. It’s part of a data funnel that enables keyword targeting, ad placement, and behavioral profiling.

For me, there’s a deeper product lesson here, but also a signal about how someone thinks. Whether a candidate answers “ads” or “search” or “email” isn’t what really matters. It’s the why behind the answer that matters most.

At the end of the day, business models directly shape product decisions. That tension is something every product manager has to navigate because they sit between the business and technical sides of a company. Being able to see and articulate that tradeoff, especially when user needs diverge from monetization incentives, is key to both building effectively and being a successful product manager.

More often the business model, like subscriptions, is more tightly connected to the product. User has X problem that product Y solves and the company receives Z dollars in exchange for access. However, there are many examples where the pricing or monetization strategy is not so clearly connected to the feature set, of which google search is a great example.

For the record, I don't ask this question to junior PMs.

I'm assuming whatever they're currently doing involves machine learning so uses more compute than the simple correct solution that a CS freshman could code up.