Plan how a 15-engineer Google team would make the internet healthier

You have just joined Google as a product manager and been given a team of 15 engineers. Your mandate is broad: come up with a plan to make the internet healthier. How would you approach it, and what plan would you bring back? ```hint Define health before choosing work A healthy internet could mean security, information quality, privacy, access or the economics of the open web. Pick a definition you can measure and a problem that 15 engineers can actually move, preferably one where Google has unusual leverage. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What does leadership mean by a healthy internet: safety and security, information quality, privacy, openness and the creator economy, or speed and access? - Should the team ship inside Google products such as Search, Chrome and Android, or build open tools and standards for the whole web? - Over what time frame will the plan be judged, and does leadership expect a measurable outcome by then? - Do the 15 engineers bring particular skills, such as security, machine learning or web platform work, and do we have design, policy and research partners? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A working definition of internet health broken into dimensions, with the stakeholders affected: users, site owners and publishers, developers, advertisers - A choice of one problem using explicit criteria such as harm, reach, Google's leverage, measurability and fit for a 15-person team - A concrete plan: the solution, how the 15 engineers are deployed, milestones, and what is deliberately out of scope - A measurable success metric with guardrails, especially against false positives that hurt legitimate sites - Risks specific to Google acting on the web: perceived gatekeeping and conflicts of interest, privacy, adversaries adapting, and ecosystem adoption ### Follow-up Questions - Your plan has Google warn users away from some websites. How do you avoid being seen as Google deciding which sites deserve traffic? - Six months in, your main metric has barely moved. What do you do? - How would the plan change with 150 engineers instead of 15?