At Booming Google, Search Chief Gives More Love to Product Managers

Even as Google’s business booms and hiring accelerates, senior leaders have made changes to the unit housing its biggest moneymakers—web search and advertising.

For instance, the sales team for Google Maps is being moved from Prabhakar Raghavan’s 20,000-person search, maps and ads product group to Google Cloud, the unit that sells cloud computing services to companies. The previously undisclosed move came after the Google Maps sales team increasingly faced difficulties in selling map data to corporate customers, according to people with knowledge of the issue. Google hopes that after the change, salespeople will be able to bundle maps alongside its more traditional cloud computing services such as data storage, these people said.

Today, we are updating our Google org chart of roughly 400 executives to reflect those and nearly three dozen other changes throughout the 140,000-employee company. They include a major structural shake-up at Google Search that favors product managers more than engineers; recent prominent exits from Google’s augmented- and virtual-reality units and its embattled artificial intelligence group, as well as a key departure and hire under Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat.