home.google
Brief
With the market for home automation expected to grow by almost 30% between 2022 and 2030, the work is cut out for Google to press their advantage in the space. Home.Google should be the landing point for new users getting acquainted with the Assistant brand, automation and hardware from Google and their 3rd party partners.
My Role
Being assigned as the Sr. Product Manager of the project meant that I had to convert the clients business objectives and wishlist of features into a scope of work that was feasible to deliver before the big reveal at the Google I/O conference 2022.
It was then my job to help the client get buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders from across the Google organization (no small feat) and kick off the work.
Complication
This project was initially simple, a flat marketing page that should be available in 7 languages and 11 regions. The real challenge was managing the exponential complexity of stakeholders. Each of them represented an invaluable viewpoint and their feedback and sign-off was crucial to launching the project on time. While there certainly were technical and UX issues to tackle (Google doesn’t like using 3rd party javascript libraries) this challenge proved the biggest one. The stakes were especially high since the site features a product catalogue of almost 700 3rd party devices, each of them representing an important business relationship and a potential sales opportunity.
Resolution
By applying the strengths of both Waterfall and Agile development processes we were able to get ahead of implementation and get feedback on all designs and photography before not having sign-off on these artifacts could become a blocker for development. Each team member had thoroughly internalized the work, knew the quality expectations and were empowered to pick up any piece of the prioritized tasks we managed in the backlog. By empowering my team I could focus on stakeholder management, demos and other process challenges.
We delivered our project perfectly on time for the conference and are still Googles most trusted agency to manage this high-value marketing and educational surface.
Media
Information about the site is found at the 26 minute mark
