Eight Years at Google: What Actually Transferred
Eight Years at Google: What Actually Transferred
I spent eight years and four months at Google, across media strategy in Hyderabad, marketing strategy and operations in Singapore, cloud strategy and operations in London, analytics leadership in Bangalore, and finally product at Google Pay. Then I left to lead product at a fintech startup. People ask what carries over. Less than you'd hope, and more than you'd think.
What didn't transfer
Scale. At Google, the distribution exists before your feature does. You ship something to a surface millions of people already open, and the numbers move because the surface is big, not because your idea was good. That is a very comfortable illusion to carry into a startup, where nothing moves unless you go and make it move.
Process, too. Big-company process is a compression algorithm for coordinating hundreds of people. Bring it to a team of ten and you've imported all the cost and none of the benefit.
What transferred completely
Doing my own analysis. Years as an analytical lead built a reflex: when I have a question about the product, I go and answer it in SQL rather than filing a request and waiting three days. It is the single highest-leverage habit I have. The gap between a question and its answer determines how many questions you're willing to ask.
Sitting on the client side of the table. As a product consultant to India's top fintech companies, I spent my days inside other people's roadmaps and constraints. You learn quickly how differently a problem looks from the seat of the person who has to live with it. That is most of what product management is.
Working across markets. UK and Ireland cloud sales, APAC marketing, India payments, three regions with genuinely different assumptions about how business gets done. It permanently killed my instinct to assume that what works in one market ports to another.
The uncomfortable part
Rotating through short-term assignments in Singapore and London taught me something I didn't enjoy learning: being effective in a new context takes longer than your confidence suggests. Eight months is barely enough to be useful. The first two are spent finding out what you were wrong about.
I try to hold that now. New company, new market, new problem, assume the first stretch is for being wrong efficiently, not for being impressive.
Why I left
Because I wanted the whole problem, not a slice of it. At Google I owned pieces of very large systems. Now I own whether a product works, and that is a much better teacher.
Balaguru skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Balaguru Sakthivel was part of the June 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 20 other talented participants.