Gmail Turns 18, Has 3 Billion Users! A Product Lead Breaks Down How Gmail Stays Interesting
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This April, Gmail will be 18 years old. That’s a big milestone, given that email as a medium just turned 50.
Launched in 2004—with its 1 GB free storage, conversation based grouping, and enhanced search capabilities—Gmail quickly became one of the most popular email services in the world.
What started off as Paul Buchheit’s side project is now part of Google Workspace, a solution that’s used by over 3 billion users.
Yet despite this growth and Gmail’s long history, the product continues to find new ways to delight its users with great experiences, new features, and constant innovation.
How does the product team do it?
To help us unpack this question, I interviewed Matthew Izatt, Product Lead for Gmail.
Matthew has been building and growing Gmail for the last 10+ years. He started off in mobile where he built the Android and iOS apps for Gmail, and eventually he became the lead product owner for all of Gmail’s front end. He also led the development of the new Gmail in 2018, which was a complex rebuild of the technical architecture and visual design, along with the addition of multiple enterprise focused features. Since then, he has been leading Google’s charge on redefining how we work as the product lead for the Workspace Platform and Partnerships efforts with a team of over 100.
What follows is an edited version of our interview.
Mustafa Kapadia: Matt, thank you for joining us. Now, before we jump into how your team does its magic, can you please share with me some of the challenges you face when you build a new feature or experience on Gmail?
Matthew Izatt: Thanks Mustafa. And I think this is a great place to start.
One of the biggest challenges is that Google Workspace is used by over 3 billion users, and while that is great, there are many different ways of using our product. It’s not like a doorbell, where there is only one way of using it. With Gmail, it’s like an infinite Swiss army knife, where everyone has their own favorite way of using the product.
Second, Gmail is a critical product for many of our users. Yes, it’s fun to use, but people use it to get important work done—sending job proposals, emailing with their kids’ teachers, or booking medical appointments. This is why we have to be careful about what we experiment with and what we roll out. We can’t just throw things out there and see what works. We have to do our homework.
Third, we have to constantly innovate and think outside the box. Email is an old product, but it continues to evolve. Every day we have new startups reinventing email and challenging the big players. If we are to remain a market leader, we literally have to rethink the product every few years. Which is why creating the new Gmail was so much fun.
Mustafa: I don’t envy you. This is not an easy product to build. Going back to something you touched on: Given these hurdles, how do you build these great experiences? Is there an example that you can share with us?
Matt: A specific example I always like to share is the story of how we came up with the right display density on our thread list. The thread list is your inbox; it’s the list of all the messages that you have. The display density is how that information is presented to you.
In Gmail you can choose to have fewer messages with a lot of information about each message. Or you can choose to see a larger number of messages with much less information about each message.
It really comes down to your preferences. And it’s one of the reasons why so many users like using Gmail. In fact, being able to set inbox display preferences is actually one of the top 10 most used settings within Gmail.
Mustafa: So you were really trying to give users choice on how they would like their information presented?
Matt: Exactly. Now, we could have added 100 different levers so that every user could customize their email feed to an infinite degree. While that is possible from a coding perspective, it’s not practical for three reasons.
First, infinite choice sounds good on paper, but in reality, too many options creates a confusing user experience. Second, development would take many months—maybe even a year. And third, it would be a long-term maintenance nightmare.
Mustafa: So how did you go about doing it? Share with me the inner workings of Gmail in Google Workspace. How is the sausage made?
Matt: Well, it came down to four key steps, working closely with our amazing UX Research team.
First came the primary research to find out if building this experience was worth doing. After all, what is the point of building it if no one wants it? For this we actually sat down with real users inside and outside of Google to understand their needs.
Second, we brainstormed 100 potential solutions and narrowed them down to 8 options. Then we mocked up each of the 8 options to see how they looked.
While it would have been easy to just pick the option we liked the most and build it, we wanted to create what our users want, not what we like the most. So we took those options and surveyed the users from step 1 again. We specifically asked them to rank their preferences across three dimensions: Love It, Hate It, or Meh!
Based on the user responses, we realized that 3 configurations would meet the needs of most users. These were the three options we developed and deployed to Google Workplace.
Mustafa: I love how you used data to guide your decision of what to build. This really is Google’s secret sauce—first-hand data collected from users.
Matt: Absolutely. Without their feedback, we would have never been able to narrow down to the 3 options that would satisfy most of our users.
Mustafa: Talking about risks: Getting user feedback and validating before you build is one way to de-risk your product, but you even de-risked your product launch strategy, correct?
Matt: Yes. Sometimes we launch features individually. Sometimes we launch them as a group. In this particular case, we had a lot of moving parts. We had a complete UI redesign, 10 or 12 new features, and architecture changes.
So to de-risk this, we put in place—I kid you not—a 26-stage launch process. We started off with the technical architecture changes—stuff that the user would not notice—to make sure that it was working. And we did it in small increments.
Then we rolled out a few features at a time, launching it first to our early access program—where users have opted in to receive updates. We measured their reaction and satisfaction first, and then moved on to the next group.
At every stage, we kept our blast radius small and put in these checks and balances where we could launch, measure reaction, and then reassess our strategy. And that worked out pretty well for us for this massive launch.
Mustafa: Agreed! Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. And good luck with building the next version of Gmail.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
How Did DTDC Express Speed Up Decision-making and Collaboration by 10x—While Cutting Costs?
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Among Indian courier and logistics businesses, DTDC has expanded rapidly since its foundation in 1990. Starting with seed capital of less than US$2,000, DTDC has grown to a US$175 million business with operations across the country and internationally.
The business is second only to the government-owned India Post in the courier and logistics sector with 522 offices, more than 10,700 franchisees, and a 5,000 employee-strong workforce.
It handles 450,000 shipments—primarily small to medium parcels—per day, has a direct presence in 12 countries, a presence through associates in 22 countries, and operates 16 gateway hubs.
DTDC’s mission is to become India’s preferred express parcel provider with a focus on the consumer and the company aims to be valued at INR 5,000 crore (about US$778 million) by 2020.
However, like all businesses in the courier and logistics sector, DTDC is facing greater competition. Most of the large ecommerce businesses in the country have created their own express delivery arms and these are contributing to heightened customer expectations.
“Businesses and consumers want information and answers now rather than later today or tomorrow,” Mrinal Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, Technology and Innovation, DTDC, says.
“For example, customers are looking for direct API integration between their systems and our tracking tools, rather than a mundane, old-style MIS-driven approach.
“The express delivery businesses themselves are eager to embrace trends such as increased predictability of delivery, greater capacity utilization, and how vehicles can be run in the most efficient way possible.”
External-facing Technology Policies
DTDC had operated a traditional technology operation including in-house infrastructure located in a mid-sized data centre at its Bangalore headquarters. This in-house data centre housed a completely virtualised server-storage environment and connected to all 522 offices by MPLS link or internet-based VPN services. The business also operated a small disaster recovery facility in another city in India.
However, DTDC realised its technology operation could not deliver the agility, flexibility, and performance needed for the business to thrive in a highly disrupted industry.
Its technology leaders started reviewing their options and in early 2017 adopted a policy that embraced external models such as public cloud services. The business moved its SAP HANA relational database management into the cloud and now is considering using Google Cloud Platform to host its core enterprise resource planning system.
Google Cloud Platform also gives DTDC the ability to analyse data in order to improve the efficiency and predictability of its services.
An Opportunity for Change
While the business had implemented cloud-based office productivity applications in 2016, these applications were not meeting its needs, Chakraborty says.
“What we observed after three years, despite a considerable cost, these applications were only being used for email rather than as a full suite of collaboration tools,” he says.
“For example, if a simple presentation file needed to be delivered for decision-making, it had to be sent to about 20 stakeholders,” he adds. “We would then have to collect feedback from each and aggregate it into a final draft. This approach compromised productivity and decision-making, and meant multiple versions of data were circulating within the organisation.”
DTDC also wanted to extend mobility from a small group within the business to the wider organisation as part of a broader project to improve collaboration, productivity, and decision-making. In addition, the business intended to improve the usability and relevance of its intranets to its employees.
Furthermore, Chakraborty and his team planned to help improve collaboration within and the performance of DTDC’s more than 10,700 franchisees in responding to customer needs.
G Suite Targeted to Increase Collaboration
Based on his previous experience with G Suite, Chakraborty recommended the cloud-based suite of intelligent applications to DTDC’s senior management team. He also provided a comprehensive cost-effort-benefit analysis to back up his recommendation.
DTDC had started with a three-week proof of concept exercise spanning 20 users across the business. Having determined that G Suite met its business requirements, the courier and logistics provider had chosen a ‘big bang’ implementation across about 5,000 users.
DTDC switched over to G Suite on 23 June 2017 and undertook an extensive user acceptance and training program—called Project Liberty—over the following two weeks with the assistance of a 24-hours-per-day, seven-days-per-week helpdesk.
“We made hundreds of calls to our employees to explain the move, created and distributed an FAQ, and provided extensive training at regional office and branch office levels,” Chakraborty says. The business also displayed posters and banners at all DTDC offices, sent teaser messages to users, and provided daily G Suite usage tips over a three-week period.
“We completed that part of the move in about six days and by 1 July 2017 we had migrated all databases and all old emails to G Suite. Two weeks later, we had signed off the job,” Chakraborty says.
Considerable Cost Savings
DTDC has reaped several rewards from its move to G Suite. The amount the business spends on video conferencing has fallen from about US$5,000 per month to nearly zero as it takes advantage of the voice and video capabilities of Google Hangouts Meet.
“Largely because the volume of email attachments has fallen dramatically since we moved to Gmail—despite the fact our business has grown significantly—we have not had to upgrade any of our links over the last year or so,” Chakraborty says.
“Team members are increasingly sending links through Google Drive instead.” The ability to store files in the cloud through Google Drive has also enabled DTDC to eliminate the need to perform local backups of users’ files.
Meanwhile, team members are also increasingly using Google Calendar to make appointments and check the availability of colleagues and superiors for meetings.
Supporting Mobilisation with G Suite
Deploying G Suite has also enabled DTDC to increase the number of workers with access to email on their mobile devices from 150 users to more than 4,000 users.
“At our National Franchisee Meeting in Delhi in February 2018, our Chairman explicitly explained in an open forum how significantly his performance had improved since we deployed G Suite and implemented mobility,” Chakraborty says.
With sharing of spreadsheets and documents rising through the use of Google Sheets and Google Docs respectively, DTDC’s employees are collaborating more effectively and making decisions faster and more easily. Several departments within the business are using Google Sites to create intranets to host commonly-accessed documents and provide knowledge bases, including FAQ documents to help employees solve problems themselves.
“Thanks to G Suite, we have experienced a 10-fold increase in the speed of collaboration, decision-making, and supporting systems,” Chakraborty says. “The activities of our management team are more transparent and cohesive while as an organisation we are making decisions in hours and minutes rather than days.”
DTDC has also completed the migration of more than 10,700 franchisees across to G Suite. “Thus DTDC has become one of the few organisations where its Chairman and Managing Director and a small franchisee in a town in India would use the same intelligent applications,” Chakraborty says. “This makes the organisation much flatter, more collaborative operation in nature.
“Furthermore, franchisees who are using G Suite have started telling us that the ease of collaboration and access to information is enabling them to resolve customer queries faster and more effectively.”
Delivering a Bright Future with Google
DTDC plans to continue developing its intranets on Google Sites and encourage further use of Google Docs and Sheets.
“We are continuing to go back to our internal teams to highlight the benefits of these products and drive takeup to create more awareness and enthusiasm,” says Chakraborty.
DTDC has also started evaluating Google’s big data and analytics platform for its internal MIS and dashboard practices. “More broadly, we see Google as key to our ability to realise our business objectives and remain competitive in the dynamic, fast-changing courier and logistics industry,” Chakraborty concludes
Google Cloud Partnership Helps Lowe’s SRE Team Achieve 20X More Releases Per Month
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Editor’s note: Today we hear from the Lowe’s SRE team. They share about how they have been able to increase the number of releases they can support by adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework and leveraging their partnership with Google Cloud.
At Lowe’s, we’ve made significant progress in our multiyear technology transformation. To modernize our systems and build new capabilities for our customers and associates, we leverage Google’s SRE framework and Google Cloud, which helps us meet their needs faster and more effectively. With these efforts, we’ve been able to go from one release every two weeks to 20+ releases daily—about 20X more releases per month.
Our SRE transformation didn’t happen overnight, though. Every step along the way brought some challenges. But looking back, we are excited to see how much we have accomplished for our customers as a result.
Back in 2018, before adopting SRE practices, we were more reactive than proactive, following an “eyes on glass” approach. On-call structures and incident management efficiency were not at optimal levels with too many repetitive and manual tasks, resulting in operational toil. Production concerns were not surfaced into the product roadmap, which resulted in delays in making fixes.
Bootstrapping SRE at Lowe’s
As we moved from on-prem to Google Cloud, we decided to move from a monolithic- to microservices-based architecture. And to better manage this new architecture, we embarked on an SRE journey.
Then as COVID-19 hit, we really had to accelerate this journey as customers increasingly moved to online ordering and delivery to meet their Total Home Improvement needs. To do so, we followed four key principles that allowed us to meet changing customer needs quickly and release fast and reliably.
- Automate away toil
As we moved from traditional Ops to an SRE ecosystem, our biggest opportunity was reducing toil, so that engineers can spend time on activities that drive business impact and customer outcomes. We think of toil as work that is manual, repetitive, tactical, devoid of enduring value—but automatable. So, to tackle toil, we focused on automating away the need for manual intervention. As an example, we made sure engineers were not the first point of contact for any alert. Any triage or resolution that an engineer can perform, a machine can be trained to do the same. We used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to automate our toil. With a long-term goal of “no toil,” our SREs work on identifying and reducing toil to a manageable level across the organization. - Engineer alignment through roadmaps
Our goal is to maximize the engineering velocity of developer teams while keeping products reliable. We want an engagement model where product, SRE and development teams are closely aligned. A key way we’ve been able to create this alignment is by having our SREs embedded into domain and product teams. Each domain has an SRE, who is involved at the beginning stages of product development to ensure that the domain stakeholders are in alignment with the SRE initiatives. As such, SREs are able to improve the reliability, performance, scalability and launch velocity of the services throughout all phases of the service lifecycle. - Adopt one-touch releases
Our path to production used to contain many manual steps and validations, slowing the rate at which we released features. Additionally, we used to bulk all our releases together to deploy at once, which increased the risk of failure and created a longer feedback loop from production. To tackle this with an SRE mindset, we created a one-touch release process in which SREs review the product team’s pull requests. When approved, this triggers a DevSecOps pipeline that deploys the approved changes to production securely. This process created a safe, reliable and sustainable continuous delivery pipeline with quick feedback loops. Striking the right balance between speed, innovation and stability, we were able to increase our releases exponentially for the year, taking less than 30 minutes per release to deliver quality code, including various automated quality checks and processes, all in just one click. - Embrace capacity planning
To ensure our services have enough spare capacity to handle any surge in traffic patterns, our SREs emphasize capacity planning, making recommended capacity changes in the continuous delivery (CD) pipeline. They constantly monitor performance to make sure the service is robust, stable and available. And when there’s a sudden surge beyond the forecasted volume, SREs change the capacity on demand and document changes for the performance and domain teams.
Capacity planning is especially important for us during peak holiday times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). We lay out our SRE stability plan three months in advance and surface into the domain team’s product roadmap. This way development teams are able to allocate sufficient engineering time to reliability. We do performance testing to ensure the environment is able to sustain increased load over long periods of time and also handle sudden surges in traffic. We also do region failover testing at a global scale to validate the automatic failover duration of service level agreements (SLAs), SRE and domain readiness. Additionally, we conduct Black Friday and Cyber Monday-specific destructive testing to validate customer experience, reliability and more.
Google Cloud’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday white-glove service played a key role in ensuring our success in both BFCM 2019 and BFCM 2020. This service included on-site visits from Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team who reviewed Lowe’s web architecture, capacity planning, operations practices for event risks, and presented workshops on topics such as incident response best practices.
Looking ahead
There is always room for improvement, and at Lowe’s we aim to continuously improve our SRE practices. One thing that has worked well for us, which we plan to continue, has been our road shows, where senior SRE leads present to other SREs and application domain teams on the latest SRE principles and best practices, and to get input in real-time from them.
Google’s tools and methodology have played an instrumental role in helping reshape our SRE practices and better serve our customers. We look forward to building on the momentum and partnership as we continue our SRE journey at Lowe’s.
If you want to learn more about how to adopt SRE best practices on Google Cloud, check out our documentation. If you want to learn more about Google SRE, visit our website. Stay tuned for the next blogs with Lowe’s discussing how they trained their engineering talent to adopt SRE practices and tooling, and how they improved MTTR using SRE principles.
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PwC uses Connected Sheets to scale data insights
It’s important for teams across the business to understand customer adoption of products and services, whether it’s the product team tracking usage of a newly released feature or the support team trying to anticipate incoming service requests. Similarly, IT teams need to analyze the adoption of an organization’s internal applications and systems, so they know what tools employees are using and how they are being used. But product adoption datasets are often too large for traditional spreadsheets to handle, and new data is continuously being added.
Connected Sheets can provide teams access to large, powerful, and up-to-date usage datasets, in the familiar Sheets interface. PwC, a global professional services organization, uses Connected Sheets as part of its efforts to make technology and data more accessible across its workforce. One way PwC uses Connected Sheets is to monitor and analyze the internal adoption of tools like G Suite.
Says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC, “If you look at our own adoption dashboarding, it’s more than three terabytes of data—good luck putting that in any spreadsheet. With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet, rather it lives in the database where it belongs. The ability to so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”
Connected Sheets helps to scale data-driven decision-making at your organization, by making powerful data easily accessible across your sales, finance, product, and IT teams.
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Securing Remote Workers with Google and Chrome Enterprise
With the proliferation of COVID-19 across the globe, the need for a remote working strategy has become paramount to keep businesses running.
A Gartner survey found that 88% of organizations have asked their employees to work remotely. And 97% of the organizations canceled work-related travel. However, only 10% of the organizations planned to reduce working hours. For us, this shows that despite the prevalence of coronavirus across the world, business demands require that work must go on.
Technologies such as Chromebooks, Chrome Browser, and SaaS applications have helped make this strategy a reality, providing access to critical data wherever employees may be working from during this challenging time.
However, this way of working has created new security challenges for IT departments, who may not be equipped to address these issues.
This session provides a walkthrough of many of Google’s solutions, such as Chrome devices, Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, BeyondCorp Remote Access, and Chrome Browser Cloud Management to ensure your business can keep secure, even in a remote working environment.
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How This 70-Year Old Japanese Shoe-maker Uses Collaboration to Beat Competition
For over six decades now, ASICS, a Japanese footwear, and sports equipment provider—for some of the biggest names in the sporting world—has been in the business of making sport a part of people’s lives. From manufacturing basketball shoes in 1949, ASICS soon began to design sports shoes for Olympians.
Headquartered in Kobe, Japan, ASICS is an acronym for the Latin phrase Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, meaning Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
“With over 65 years of history in the sporting goods business, we care for more than just quality products. We’re obsessed with customer experience,” says Paul Miles, Senior General Manager, Global Marketing Division, ASICS.
And without technology that’s not possible.
“Technology is helping us work better with athletes wherever they are. Whether it’s studying their performance, predicting the needs of customers through data, developing our products or simply inventing. Tech is enabling a new realm of possibility. When tech enables collaboration without limitation, the customer wins,” says Miles.
Watch the video to find out how ASICS has retained its place and how it continues to beat competition in a crowded sports market.
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