There’s a pretty major executive reshuffle happening at Google right now.
The reshuffle was supposed to take place and be announced last week, but Google decided to pause it for a few days, with all of the protests happening across the country. Google still has not officially anounced this executive reshuffle yet, but a memo that was sent out to the company has been leaked to Search Engine Land, so we know what’s happening.
Prabhakar Raghavan is now in charge of Search/Assistant, Maps, and Ads
In the midst of this shuffle, Google has put one person in charge of three of its most important products. That’s Search/Assistant, Maps and Ads. Prabhakar Raghavan is taking the reigns there.
Raghavan currently oversees Commerce, Payments/Next Billion Users and Ads. And now he’s getting Search/Assistant and Maps added to his place. Google’s CEO, Sunder Pichai stated in the memo that this is going to provide a “user focused view across our knowledge product efforts.”
He is replacing Ben Gomes who was put in charge of Search engineering in 2018, and led all of Search. He is moving onto Education, Arts & Culture. As well as other learning-related efforts with the goal of making them “more closely to flagship products and core user experiences.”
The other big reshuffle includes Jen Fitzpatrick, who had been the long-time head of Maps and Local. She is now leading the Core and Corporate Engineering. That is a team that has over 8,000 employees that deal with infrastructure, Google Accounts and Privacy.
In the memo, Pichai wrote that “Jen’s deep product knowledge and experience focusing on important areas such as privacy will set her up well to lead these teams.”
Executives were “ready for new challenges”
The reorganization here at Google comes as both of these executives were “ready for new challenges” according to Pichai. Who also noted that he “took the opportunity to make some changes across [their] flagship knowledge products and help them work together more seamlessly.”
Reorganizations don’t just happen because an executive is leaving or because the ideas have become stale. But when it’s time to change things up. The companies that can change things up pretty often like Google, are the ones that do the best. As it brings in fresh blood and new ideas, keeping everything nice and fresh.
These changes are also very similar to Hiroshi Lockheimer taking charge of all of consumer-facing operating systems/platforms. So it does look very familiar.