War, Peace and Sundar Pichai

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Horatio

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  • #1
    In tech circles, people regularly talk about "Wartime leaders" and "Peacetime leaders", where a wartime leader is one that is more focused on explosive growth, and "winning" something. The example GOAT is Steve Jobs, who "won" the mobile war and made Apple what it is. Others include Jeff Bezos, and Satya Nadella. But once the war is won, often the CEO changes to a peacetime leader, who focuses on expanding the business and really extracting every ounce of value out of their "win". In Apple's case, it was again probably the greatest peacetime CEO of all time, Tim Cook, and in Google's case, it was Sundar Pichai.

    But now Google's win is faltering - it's widely believed that Google's search quality is much worse, mostly due to Google shitting up the entire first page with first-party content and ads, but also because Google was caught flat-footed by GenAI, which it literally invented. Now Google is fighting again, but also doing rounds of layoffs, and Pichai has hung the sword of Damocles over the heads of employees by saying that there are more layoffs coming, but not where.

    Is it time for Google to move back to a wartime footing, and if so, is it time for Pichai to step aside?
     
    cateye

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  • #2
    Pichai came to Google from McKinsey, didn't he? I would say his public persona comes across exactly like some emotionless high-value consultant, there to view every expense with suspicion and enforce the sort of spreadsheet management that drives returns but decimates morale and brand. Ironically, his approach is probably necessary from an operational standpoint. I have no doubt that Google's resource management (human or otherwise) is as unfocused as their approach to products. Every company needs that structure. The problem is it's not balanced against a foundation that explains "...and here's where we're going next." At least not that is publicly visible. Everything they've done lately feels like a reaction to other company's vision or roadmaps.

    Cook's success is his ability to both be a spreadsheet jockey, and fiercely protective of Apple's brand sheen. Apple is no longer interesting because of Jobs, it's interesting because it's Apple and Cook's mastery is due at least in part to recognizing that. As another comparison, Zuckerberg all but embraces his persona as reviled boy wonder and taunts the naysayers to bet against Meta by declaring his (and therefore the company's) focus and then plowing forward. He may be undisciplined, but he's not afraid of putting ideas out there and rallying his massive organization around them.

    So as a result, by way of these comparisons, I wonder if Pichai is both necessary and the wrong person for the job.
     
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  • #3
    Honestly, regardless of Pichai's competence or lack thereof for certain types of leadership, getting a new person at the helm who just repeats "we will not cancel products arbitrarily" on infinite repeat would be helpful.

    It would also be helpful if that person had a vision and long term goals for Alphabet/Google as it bifurcates into all these different businesses, but starting with building trust that the product stack won't shift out from underneath customer's feet is a start. Obviously some products will probably need to get cancelled or consolidated to firm up the remainder, but those transitions could be handled so much differently than they have been in the last few years.

    I don't think Pichai can possibly be that person.
     
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    LordDaMan

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  • #4
    cateye said:
    Pichai came to Google from McKinsey, didn't he? I would say his public persona comes across exactly like some emotionless high-value consultant, there to view every expense with suspicion and enforce the sort of spreadsheet management that drives returns but decimates morale and brand. Ironically, his approach is probably necessary from an operational standpoint. I have no doubt that Google's resource management (human or otherwise) is as unfocused as their approach to products. Every company needs that structure. The problem is it's not balanced against a foundation that explains "...and here's where we're going next." At least not that is publicly visible. Everything they've done lately feels like a reaction to other company's vision or roadmaps.
    Click to expand...

    Google's problem has always been that it's run by geeks, doing geek things.

    That's fine and all that, but it leads to lost of dead projects because from the consumer standpoint, these projects look like real serious efforts and not some programmer having fun doing something weird.

    Google needs something like Microsoft's Garage/Research. A part of the company dedicated to just making neat things. Sometimes it's very usefull things like some of the tech used for rending 3d scene in various video games. Some of it is useless silly stuff or esoteric research on a topic that may never be used commercially.
     
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  • #5
    I don't disagree that Google could use a serious leadership shakeup but I think you've missed the mark for why they are faltering. They aren't failing, at least not yet, because GenAI is eating their lunch (e.g. Bing). I also don't think they are faltering because they are relying more on first party answers.

    Instead I'd say they are losing because they can't seem to focus. They launch new products only to kill them later, to the point that people won't adopt a new Google product because they expect it to be killed in a short amount of time. Key products that should be stable are routinely cancelled, replaced, and renamed to the point no one knows what they are. One only needs to look at Google Wallet, I mean Google Pay, I mean Google Wallet or to look at Google Hangouts, I mean Allo, I mean ??? to see the problem. A digital wallet and messaging should have been a key, and more importantly stable, piece of the Google ecosystem. This is not to say they shouldn't have ever changed them on the back end but the customer facing product should have been stable with minimal, or at least slow change, and no constant renaming or coexisting but competing products.

    They've also let their original business of search become a mess of SEO content mills while failing to noticeably stop the deterioration let alone improve search results in more than decade. In fact they've actively made it worse by removing or at least reducing things like strict commands (such as must include or must not include).

    Back to your central thesis of a "war time" vs "peace time" leader, in order to be competent even a peace time leader needs to be able to recognize when they need to change or step aside. That is the biggest failure Google leadership is making. They aren't recognizing their own limitations (although that's probably a very common fault of any CEO). Someone who can't grow into new markets, maintain existing products, or even recognize early when stuff isn't working should go. Additionally, anyone who, upon recognizing the business isn't working like they want, has the reaction to do layoffs with no obvious goal in doing so beyond reducing cost is doubly failing. They are unwittingly acknowledging that they missed the problem early and now are blindly reacting while still not recognizing the cause of the problem and demonstrating and unwillingness or inability to figure it out.
     
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  • #6
    lithven said:
    Instead I'd say they are losing because they can't seem to focus. They launch new products only to kill them later, to the point that people won't adopt a new Google product because they expect it to be killed in a short amount of time. Key products that should be stable are routinely cancelled, replaced, and renamed to the point no one knows what they are. One only needs to look at Google Wallet, I mean Google Pay, I mean Google Wallet or to look at Google Hangouts, I mean Allo, I mean ??? to see the problem. A digital wallet and messaging should have been a key, and more importantly stable, piece of the Google ecosystem. This is not to say they shouldn't have ever changed them on the back end but the customer facing product should have been stable with minimal, or at least slow change, and no constant renaming or coexisting but competing products.
    Click to expand...
    Right, and this kind of thing (pejoratively called "promotion driven development") is a symptom of peacetime leadership - it's really easy to greenlight everything and kill it later once the shiny is off. It's hard to say "no", knowing that someone might really care about that and leave to do it elsewhere. Now, we don't see this at Apple, since Apple is much more top-down, and doesn't let engineers and PMs run the show. But we definitely don't see this at companies with wartime leaders, since it distracts from focus.
    lithven said:
    They've also let their original business of search become a mess of SEO content mills while failing to noticeably stop the deterioration let alone improve search results in more than decade. In fact they've actively made it worse by removing or at least reducing things like strict commands (such as must include or must not include).
    Click to expand...
    Yeah, this is an own-goal they should never have let happen, but Google has like 800 VPs of Product Management...
    lithven said:
    Back to your central thesis of a "war time" vs "peace time" leader, in order to be competent even a peace time leader needs to be able to recognize when they need to change or step aside. That is the biggest failure Google leadership is making.
    Click to expand...
    I think that Google needs to realize that peacetime is ending, or rather, the pie is growing again - Peacetime leadership has a great deal of rent-seeking built in, and Pichai has done an amazing job of putting Google search on every surface everywhere, no matter the cost.
     
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  • #7
    LordDaMan said:
    Google's problem has always been that it's run by geeks, doing geek things.

    That's fine and all that, but it leads to lost of dead projects because from the consumer standpoint, these projects look like real serious efforts and not some programmer having fun doing something weird.

    Google needs something like Microsoft's Garage/Research. A part of the company dedicated to just making neat things. Sometimes it's very usefull things like some of the tech used for rending 3d scene in various video games. Some of it is useless silly stuff or esoteric research on a topic that may never be used commercially.
    Click to expand...
    I think it used to be like that, but I think they ended things like 20% time, and moved a lot of their moonshots to other Alphabet properties, or GoogleX. This thread has a couple of interesting screenshots describing the before and after of Sundar:
    www.threads.net

    Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life) on Threads

    Reading current and former Google employees talk about the company on Hacker News and there’s definitely a sense that they blame Sundar Pichai for “ruining” the company given before and after Sundar comparisons being made. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034277
    www.threads.net www.threads.net
     
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  • #8
    cateye said:
    So as a result, by way of these comparisons, I wonder if Pichai is both necessary and the wrong person for the job.
    Click to expand...
    I think he was the right person, but now isn't - Google's stock price exploded under his leadership, its just in the recent year or so that its underperformed peers, and I think it's because he's bet too hard on search supremacy, and search is now under threat.
     
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  • #9
    lithven said:
    Instead I'd say they are losing because they can't seem to focus. They launch new products only to kill them later, to the point that people won't adopt a new Google product because they expect it to be killed in a short amount of time. Key products that should be stable are routinely cancelled, replaced, and renamed to the point no one knows what they are. One only needs to look at Google Wallet, I mean Google Pay, I mean Google Wallet or to look at Google Hangouts, I mean Allo, I mean ??? to see the problem. A digital wallet and messaging should have been a key, and more importantly stable, piece of the Google ecosystem. This is not to say they shouldn't have ever changed them on the back end but the customer facing product should have been stable with minimal, or at least slow change, and no constant renaming or coexisting but competing products.
    Click to expand...
    I think it’s even deeper. Another way to say ‘lack of focus’ is ‘lack of consumer orientation’. If you really thought of the people using Hangouts as valuable customers you wouldn’t rug pull them. If you thought of the people using Wallet as valuable customers you wouldn’t rug pull them.

    At the C-Suite level you could only create this sort of dysfunctional product roulette system if you fundamentally didn’t think of your users as customers… which of course they don’t because their customers are advertisers. I’d argue that all of Google’s ills flow naturally from being advertising-focused and how that perverts the C-Suite and middle managements view of their users.

    It would take an extremely strong voice to instill a customer service ethic on the user side while maintaining their advertiser relationships on the dollars side. This ain’t it.
     
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  • #10
    wrylachlan said:
    At the C-Suite level you could only create this sort of dysfunctional product roulette system if you fundamentally didn’t think of your users as customers… which of course they don’t because their customers are advertisers. I’d argue that all of Google’s ills flow naturally from being advertising-focused and how that perverts the C-Suite and middle managements view of their users.
    Click to expand...
    Hmm, well, maybe they need a really dynamic leader that's not afraid to tell advertisers "Go fuck yourself"...
     
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  • #11
    Horatio said:
    I think he was the right person, but now isn't - Google's stock price exploded under his leadership, its just in the recent year or so that its underperformed peers, and I think it's because he's bet too hard on search supremacy, and search is now under threat.
    Click to expand...
    It's worse than just that.

    Search is under threat from AI (they didn't do as well as competitors, fumbled a few steps but at least saw this coming) and from themselves as search quality goes down, advertising gets pushed to the top of search, and as noted, a lot of the power tools have been reduced in effectiveness. It feels like Google has given up in the arms race between SEO professionals and its own need to catch people trying to game SEO to reduce the quality of search results. Lots of the search-adjacent stuff is doing fine (e.g. spinning Google Goggles tech into Google Translate is fantastic, the upcoming circle-to-search feature in Samsung phones etc) but for the medium term they've taken their eyes off of the business that made them. LLM AI probably can't replace 'search' as we think of it today--at least not 'soon', but they're not really showing signs of adapting all that well to a blended future without neglecting their search products in the meantime.
     
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  • #12
    Horatio said:
    Hmm, well, maybe they need a really dynamic leader that's not afraid to tell advertisers "Go fuck yourself"...
    Click to expand...
    Heh. Yeah, not what I meant. I meant someone that can say to the internal team. “You have my permission to ignore the pressure from advertisers and do what’s right for our users - I’ll figure out how to turn that into dollars.”
     
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    koala

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  • #13
    I don't really see how Google is failing. It's a commercial company, and its goal is to make money, not be a good search engine?

    AI could eat its lunch, but has it done that yet?

    Profits/revenue seem good, at least from my uneducated in economy eyes, they look quite similar to Apple... (and I see an arrow pointing down in Apple's Y/Y revenue, while Google's pointing up.)

    Yes, as any big company, some upstart, more nimble competitor could drive it into irrelevancy relatively quickly. But even AI is speculation at this point. It might be wishful thinking on my behalf, but while I think AI has a bright future, I think there's a nice bubble waiting to burst there.
     
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  • #14
    koala said:
    Profits/revenue seem good, at least from my uneducated in economy eyes, they look quite similar to Apple... (and I see an arrow pointing down in Apple's Y/Y revenue, while Google's pointing up.)
    Click to expand...
    It's doing very well, but not relative to peers:
    www.threads.net

    Tirth Patel (@tirth.im) on Threads

    Around 2014-2016 all 4 were performing similar-ish. Then Google massively underperformed compared to its peers.
    www.threads.net www.threads.net

    Yeah, this guy cherry picked a time frame, but even if you do it for more recent history, the others are doing better.
     
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    Horatio

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  • #18
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  • #19
    Horatio said:
    This LinkedIn post has been making the rounds describing what Google is like now. One gets the sense that a rot has set in and is hollowing the company out

    www.linkedin.com

    Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn: My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one… | 643 comments

    My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and… | 643 comments on LinkedIn
    www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
    Click to expand...
    That’s a pretty damning indictment but it absolutely rings true given what we can see from the outside.

    Honestly it feels to me like Google Glass and Google+ failing broke Google’s spirit.
     
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  • #20
    wrylachlan said:
    That’s a pretty damning indictment but it absolutely rings true given what we can see from the outside.

    Honestly it feels to me like Google Glass and Google+ failing broke Google’s spirit.
    Click to expand...
    I don’t think it was when Google+ failed.
    I think it was when they gave up Google Wave and started Google+.

    The development and release of Wave was not executed well and it might have failed ultimately. But it had its vision distinguishing itself from other social services. Google gave up too early, and I think it’s because they lost their braveness and decided to copy successful product of competitor, Facebook.

    Google+ was a copy of Facebook. Of course they added some improvements but I don’t think they were big enough and fundamentally it was still just a copy of Facebook.

    And what was the vision? Connecting every other Google services to Google+. I may call it a marketing strategy of the company, but not a vision suitable for Google+.
     
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  • #22
    I just think nearly all small companies which do right things, grow up to be huge companies. Huge companies are nearly always dysfunctional.

    Google was a company that did things VERY right (IMHO), so the contrast is even more jarring.

    At some point, another small company that does the right things will eat Google's toast. And because they are still making a ton of money, they won't change until that's too late.

    IIRC, I just badly summed up "The Innovator's Dilemma"?
     
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  • #23
    Ember said:
    I don’t think it was when Google+ failed.
    I think it was when they gave up Google Wave and started Google+.
    Click to expand...
    Going to have to agree to disagree. I tried using Google Wave and I don’t think any amount of iteration was going to turn that into a usable product. Was it a super cool innovative ‘ Google’ idea? Sure. But at the end of the day it wasn’t useful. In contrast, the wave-inspired shared editing Google Docs were extremely useful and rightfully took off.
     
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    koala

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  • #24
    I'll disagree in the other direction. Wave as a fleeting chance to innovate on email. We got Slack instead, which sucks. I don't know if Google could have executed Wave, but it was a very worthwhile experiment that I think they should have invested more on. Also, they had the unique capacibility of shoving it down everyone's throats via GMail, which might have been the right move.

    The killing of Wave stings me more than Google Reader. And I was a heavy Google Reader user.
     
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  • #25
    koala said:
    Wave as a fleeting chance to innovate on email. We got Slack instead, which sucks.
    Click to expand...
    The ‘innovating on email’ that stands out to me isn’t Slack but Asana. It’s sort of the opposite of Wave in that it’s highly structured. But it does a tremendous job of cutting out the back and forth. For me Asana + Slack + Google Docs is a much more focused improvement to workflow than Wave was ever going to be.
     
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  • #27
    koala said:
    I just think nearly all small companies which do right things, grow up to be huge companies. Huge companies are nearly always dysfunctional.

    Google was a company that did things VERY right (IMHO), so the contrast is even more jarring.

    At some point, another small company that does the right things will eat Google's toast. And because they are still making a ton of money, they won't change until that's too late.

    IIRC, I just badly summed up "The Innovator's Dilemma"?
    Click to expand...
    It's also the entire history of computing There's very few companies who ever where in the top more then a few years. There's even fewer still that after a decade are still in business or even recognizable as the same company.

    It always boils down to a few things
    1. The top company gets complacent and starts delivering a bad product
    2. A smaller company has a much better version of the same product
    3. The smaller company starts to eat into the top company's profits on the product and the top company still doesn;t acknowledge it has a problem and takes zero steps to fix it
    Microsoft and Apple didn't get ahead simply because they had a better product at a certain time. It's because everyone else also constantly and consistently screwed up and Microsoft and Apple took advantage of it
     
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  • #28
    Google Wave's rise and fall were both before Pichai's tenure as CEO and not run by him, so it's hard to pin that one on him. Likewise he wasn't involved with creating Google+. He was involved with shutting it down but it was very clear by then that Google+ had lost.

    If he came in seeing those as failures of Google's planning and that it was his job to recover from those and provide leadership towards a clear solution for messaging/email and a clear solution for social media then he has failed miserably at both of those.

    I'm not sure what specific failure or problem if any broke Google's heart and that's almost immaterial. They're inconsistent about getting ahead of problems/seeing problems coming and that leads them to be reactionary. Have enough problems piling on each other and enough scrambling to 'fix' problems, and you end up with what looks pretty obviously like a lack of vision and planning in many cases. In a few others, they've stayed the course, like ensuring everyone is addicted to Chrome (or at least Edge). Had they stayed on top of their core products and nurtured a reasonable number of new ones (without giving up on so many) rather than trying to do everything, then maybe the prophecy of a disheartenened Google wouldn't fulfill itself.
     
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  • #29
    Ember said:
    I’m not saying Wave was great. The alternative, copying Facebook was the beginning of Google’s decline.
    If Google came up with other new idea/solution, killing Wave was OK. But putting almost all of their resources to copy Facebook was the the worst option they could pick.
    Click to expand...
    Yeah, I’m not sure the timing makes sense to think of Google+ as having anything to do with the death of Wave. Wave launched at essentially the same time that Google Docs got collaborative editing, so the two were duking it out for mindshare. Google discontinued Wave a full year before Google+ launched and by that point it was clear to everyone that Google Docs was the superior collaborative experience. Google Docs, not Google+ killed Wave.
     
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  • #30
    Heh, I was about to look up what was the relationship in time between Docs and Wave- I think Wave was a smidgen earlier? IMHO, Google Docs is also a "failure" for collaboration. It's a major improvement to word processors and spreadsheets. And spreadsheets are very important. However, Wave had a more attractive future.

    wrylachlan said:
    The ‘innovating on email’ that stands out to me isn’t Slack but Asana. It’s sort of the opposite of Wave in that it’s highly structured. But it does a tremendous job of cutting out the back and forth. For me Asana + Slack + Google Docs is a much more focused improvement to workflow than Wave was ever going to be.
    Click to expand...
    I've heard good things about Asana/Linear/Monday, but I've never used them. My impression is that they are better executions (esp. nicer than Jira), but not really innovative? (Better polish is a major feature, which can make or break a product.) Or is there anything really innovative in Asana?
     
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  • #31
    koala said:
    Or is there anything really innovative in Asana?
    Click to expand...
    The thing that really stands out is that the fundamental unit in Asana is not the message (as in email), the fundamental unit is the task. Tasks can be sent back and forth between people, made visible to many people, brought into larger collections (Projects), followed, etc. And 100% of the conversation and context stays with the task. So you go out on vacation and need to assign your task to someone else they get everything.

    When using it well within an organization it can almost completely replace email.
     
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  • #33
    Except that issue tracking is not generalized task management. My group wanted ClickUp, which is more powerful competitor of Asana. Both ClickUp and Asana are pretty easily set up, configured, andcustomized. Most issue trackers are highly focused on software development and support and aren't really customizable enough to be used as general task/project managers. Our internal software provisioning group did not want to certify any new software, so we are using a hodgepodge of task managers instead.

    At least our new parent uses Asana, so I am recommending our group adopt it for our workflows.
     
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  • #34
    Oh, yes, there's a gap there to provide the same benefits that software issue trackers bring to non-development. But other than those products being better tailored to normal task tracking (like Trello), the ideas mentioned by wrylachlan are pretty run-of-the-mill. I kinda imagine those products being nicer, but I haven't used them and I always wonder if they have "new" ideas.
     
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  • #35
    Not so much new as friendlier for less technical users. In both Clickup and Asana, it's trivial to:
    • Create lists and projects with any number of fields, including custom fields of almost data type
    • Create a multiple of views that can be clicked through with different sorts, filters, and groupings
    • Group dynamically based on custom fields (e.g. I use it to group by client name)
    • Communicate, comment, and add documents, whiteboards, and external links
    • Integrate with Slack
    • Assign and track at will

    They are both very polished and usable for non-formally trained PMs and employees, like salespeople, client success teams, marketing teams, attorneys, contract specialists, and sales operations.

    Trello is missing a bunch of features, such as a terrible grid/table view. Smartsheet requires too much setup to enable out-of-the-box functions, and lighter-weight task managers, like ToDoist don't do tables at all.

    Monday is another decent one.

    I currently use Notion, but I'll have to give it up once I migrate to the parent IT structure as it's not certified, but Asana is, and I'll figure out how to link it to my notes somehow. Setting up Notion took a bit, but it was nice to have one app for notes and task/project management for a while.

    To get back on topic, these types of functions are just not available in the Google suite. But at least most task and project managers will integrate with Google Calendar.
     
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    koala

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  • #36
    Oh, I feel Google is trying to clone Notion very slowly. (Notion is something I think is innovative. Well, probably Lotus Notes did documents and databases when dinosaurs roamed the Earth...)

    In any case, I think it doesn't make sense for Google to try and do all. After all, they are an advertising company. Of course, it makes sense they try to get into other markets to have a contingency plan, but...
     
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  • #37
    Horatio said:
    It's doing very well, but not relative to peers:
    www.threads.net

    Tirth Patel (@tirth.im) on Threads

    Around 2014-2016 all 4 were performing similar-ish. Then Google massively underperformed compared to its peers.
    www.threads.net www.threads.net

    Yeah, this guy cherry picked a time frame, but even if you do it for more recent history, the others are doing better.
    Click to expand...
    No, that's not right. YoY growth google is about in the middle of those same stocks.

    It's also a silly chart as it doesn't take into account things like dividends and the like
     
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  • #38
    LordDaMan said:
    Google's problem has always been that it's run by geeks, doing geek things.

    That's fine and all that, but it leads to lost of dead projects because from the consumer standpoint, these projects look like real serious efforts and not some programmer having fun doing something weird.

    Google needs something like Microsoft's Garage/Research. A part of the company dedicated to just making neat things. Sometimes it's very usefull things like some of the tech used for rending 3d scene in various video games. Some of it is useless silly stuff or esoteric research on a topic that may never be used commercially.
    Click to expand...
    They've had that all along. What they haven't had is any discipline about what they work on having to be an actual new thing, not undermine their existing product line, and have some realistic development path to profitability.
     
    S

    Shavano

    Ars Legatus Legionis
    59,253
    Subscriptor
  • #39
    lithven said:
    Back to your central thesis of a "war time" vs "peace time" leader, in order to be competent even a peace time leader needs to be able to recognize when they need to change or step aside. That is the biggest failure Google leadership is making. They aren't recognizing their own limitations (although that's probably a very common fault of any CEO). Someone who can't grow into new markets, maintain existing products, or even recognize early when stuff isn't working should go. Additionally, anyone who, upon recognizing the business isn't working like they want, has the reaction to do layoffs with no obvious goal in doing so beyond reducing cost is doubly failing. They are unwittingly acknowledging that they missed the problem early and now are blindly reacting while still not recognizing the cause of the problem and demonstrating and unwillingness or inability to figure it out.
    Click to expand...
    That's why standard corporate structure has a board of directors, and why boards should fire CEO's shit like that and find somebody that can point the company toward a future that includes its success.
     
    B

    billyroberts

    Smack-Fu Master, in training
    1
  • #40
    papadage said:
    Not so much new as friendlier for less technical users. In both Clickup and Asana, it's trivial to:
    • Create lists and projects with any number of fields, including custom fields of almost data type
    • Create a multiple of views that can be clicked through with different sorts, filters, and groupings
    • Group dynamically based on custom fields (e.g. I use it to group by client name)
    • Communicate, comment, and add documents, whiteboards, and external links
    • Integrate with Slack
    • Assign and track at will

    They are both very polished and usable for non-formally trained PMs and employees, like salespeople, client success teams, marketing teams, attorneys, contract specialists, and sales operations.

    Trello is missing a bunch of features, such as a terrible grid/table view. Smartsheet requires too much setup to enable out-of-the-box functions, and lighter-weight task managers, like ToDoist don't do tables at all.

    Monday is another decent one.

    I currently use Notion, but I'll have to give it up once I migrate to the parent IT structure as it's not certified, but Asana is, and I'll figure out how to link it to my notes somehow. Setting up Notion took a bit, but it was nice to have one app for notes and task/project management for a while.

    To get back on topic, these types of functions are just not available in the Google suite. But at least most task and project managers will integrate with Google Calendar.
    Click to expand...
    Clickup has a great integration with Slack, as far as I'm concerned. And the service itself is easy to create tasks
     
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