In a surprising move, Larry Page has transferred leadership of multiple core products from himself to Sundar Pichai, a Senior Vice President at Google.
Pichai was previously in charge of Android, Chrome and Google Apps, and will now see research, search, maps, Google+, commerce and ad products and infrastructure added to his responsibilities. Page will continue to oversee business and operations, including access and energy (Craig Barratt’s new division), Nest, Calico, Google X, corporate development, legal, finance and business, which also includes ad sales.
Page made the change in part to reduce the number of people reporting to him in order to focus on Google’s “bigger picture” and “is unable to do that with so many reports and a myriad of duties related to each product unit,”, according to Re/code.
Transferring one of Google’s core products – Search – shows how much trust Page places in Pichai. Now, instead of the heads of each of those product areas reporting directly to Page, they now report to Pichai, who then reports to Page. This means Amit Singhal, head of Search, will now report to Pichai and not Page.
Re/code notes that one unit that was not transferred was YouTube, which is headed by Susan Wojcicki, who will still report directly to Page.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020