Transcript

Rachid: Shenaz, welcome to the final episode of Season Two of the Made by Google Podcast. Great to have you. Please tell us a little bit more about your role at Google and how you ended up here.

Shenaz Zack: Thank you, Rachid. I am thrilled to be on the Made by Google Podcast. And currently, I lead the Pixel software PM and UX team. Well, if I tell you how I ended here, it's a very long journey in a long, windy road, and it'll take the full podcast, but we can skip that. I've been at Google for over 16 years now. And I thoroughly absolutely enjoy working on Pixel software. Primarily because it aims to deliver experiences that can make your day-to-day problems into helpful experiences, and I personally really enjoy solving problems.

Rachid: Wonderful. We'll get to how Pixel helps solving problems.

Now, regular listeners of the Made by Google Podcast know that we have this internal directory at Google where you can look up everyone in the company, and then there is this like motto or, or mission statement that every person can have up there. And yours is Precious Pixel Perfectionist. Please tell me a little bit more about that.

Shenaz Zack: Sure. I did write that a little while ago. But I have to say I joined the Pixel team on the day of the Pixel One launch, which was October 4th, 2016. My daughter's birthday is on October 4th, who's very, very precious to me and we've been launching phones on October 4th for a couple of years now, a day on or off, and so the Pixel also has become extremely precious to me.

And as the Pixel is designed to deliver, again, like I said earlier, a level of personal intelligence that helps you with your day-to-day problems, I kind of also want to be a perfectionist in helping you do that.

Also Lord of The Rings is one of my favourite movie series, and in that movie, the Ring is very precious. So the Pixel is very precious to me. My mother calls my Pixel, my oOxygen. She's like, you cannot be without your phone can you. So I put my motto as Precious Pixel Perfectionist.

Rachid: That makes perfect sense. I'm just wondering, what do you remember about that very, very first Pixel launch?

Shenaz Zack: Oh, it was so exciting. So I was on another team that was delivering something for Pixel as well. And it was extremely exciting to launch this new phone. I remember…I can visually still remember the hardware design of it. And apart from the euphoria that I still remember of launching this device for Pixel, the excitement for me of joining the team and being like, wow, there is so much more that we can deliver with the phone. And this is just the start.

Rachid: And it was, and people already loved the camera back then, it was well received. Now, you know, you blink your eyes twice suddenly we're at the seventh generation of. What do you think differentiates Pixels today?

Shenaz Zack: I will say that you know, it's fair to say we've learned a lot over the last few years. And in the beginning in 2021 with Pixel 6 you saw a huge advancement in Pixel phones built with Google Tensor, our custom design, SOC, that brings AI right to the centre of Pixel experience.

And with our seventh generation, which we're referring to as Pixel 7 Pro, you can really see the benefits of bringing together our foundational technologies, AI, Android, and Google Tensor.

Over the years, listening, learning from our users, and as you rightfully said, the camera is still amazing and leading and helps you capture the right moment at the right time of the people you care with, amazing photography or also like, you know, one of my features is, removing photo bombers from that picture that you want to share.

And I just did that for my son's prom. He had gone for the prom and he shared pictures with me, and I was like, Ooh, these just don't look right. Let me help fix them for you.

Rachid: Oh, that's amazing. You helped him with that. That's wonderful.

Shenaz Zack: For once, like you know, teenage boy he was like, 'Yes, ma'am. Thank you. I love you'. Again, there are just so many helpful features. Another one for me personally is Call Assist.

Helping our users when they're calling, because it is a phone, and the Pixel is a phone. People forget that it's a phone. You still use it to make phone calls with the phone. With Call Screen as part of Call Assist is ignoring the people you don't want to speak to or spammers. Like helping to stop spammers.

I will say I do Call Screen my kids as well sometimes. I do because when they're calling me three times, I'm like, why are you calling me? And they will say why they're calling me, and I'm like, okay, don't have time to answer right now. So they call me and go, ''mom, mom, mom, mom, answer.''

Another feature that I do wanna talk about is translate. I'm bilingual. I speak a lot of languages. And so, last year we launched a feature called Live Translate, or I think the year before, I forget, but we keep working on it, where you can translate apart from speech, also chat.

So like, if you're on a chat and if you're bilingual, you know, my mother-in-law or my school friend still forward me messages in Hindi, which I do read, but it takes me a longer time to read.

Responding takes me longer as well. But now with Live Translate, right in that chat, I can see the translation and respond in that language. So again, it's going back to how we help turn day-to-day problems into helpful experiences.

Rachid: I'm just wondering, how do you decide in which area you're gonna work to make Pixel helpful for people? I mean, there's, I'm guessing there's probably a list of 100 things you could do. So how do you prioritize what to work on?

Shenaz Zack: Sure. There's a long process to do that, right? First and the most important thing is listening to our users. Listening to our users. Interviewing our users. I personally, my team personally, spend a lot of time on Reddit, Twitter, on forums, reading about how users are using these features, and what are the pain points they have with their phones.

After that, you know, the team goes through a massive exercise of building on this list. We put them to user research, multiple rounds of user research, which includes both quantitative and qualitative. We evaluate how good the tech is to do some of these features, right? Like, you know, we started with the Call Screen, how good is the tech? Because you don't wanna put out something when the tech is not good, right? So I think that's the process, and it's always finding the problem, and then the tech, rather than having the tech and finding the problem to solve.

Rachid: I think that's an important lesson for most people in tech listening. Now we started with phones, of course Pixel Buds followed soon after. Then we got to Watch, and of course soon the Tablet as well that we announced last year. Why is it important to develop several of these Pixel product areas?

Shenaz Zack: Primarily because Pixel is a portfolio of devices? And it's a vision that we wanna build the launching of a very impressive lineup of beautifully designed Pixel phones, Watches, earbuds, and as you said, we've announced the tablet that comes together to, again, as I said, going back to the statement of making your life easier and delivering the helpfulness of Google straight to you by solving your problems.

Because you do use other devices than just your phone. You have your watch, like I have my watch. I need a larger screen sometimes, you know, to unwind, to see some videos, play some games. Or Earbuds especially when I'm walking or running or walking my dog, right? And I think having that portfolio because it's connected and unlocking all kinds of helpful ambient experiences is extremely important.

How about, you know, when you're taking a selfie, but you wanna put your phone away and take your watch to take a picture from your phone, right? So you can just kind of click on your phone rather than running back and forth from that phone, which you've put for a selfie. And there's no more selfie arm in the group pick. And I'm not very tall, so my selfie arm is pretty big. So I love using my watch to take that group selfie of me and the kids many times.

Rachid: So let's, let's dive into that a little bit deeper. Not specifically the group selfie, but what I mean is, you know, creating those individual Pixel products, I'm sure, is a challenge in and of itself, but then of course, you also want them to work together. Is it just about making the best product rather than getting them to talk to each other? Is there more to it?

Shenaz Zack: I think there's a lot more to it, right? It's connecting the products. It's, again, like I said, going back to helping our users in their lives based on all the products that they're using, right? So a common one is WiFi credentials and finding your device, right? You shouldn't have to log into the same WiFi network with your different, different devices, right? Why doesn't this just work? And so you log in with your Pixel phone and the Pixel watch will just connect, right?

How many times, like, oh, I remember my kids going like, ''Oh my God, I can't find my Pixel Buds. I'm like you can use Find My Device to find Pixel Buds. Again, thinking of those where like, they feel just like, duh, this should just work. Right? And that's the philosophy that these devices should just work together. And like I said, also helping you take a picture.

Rachid: Those are some great features indeed across the whole ecosystem making it all come together. Now, recently we had episodes on Spatial Audio and also Fall Detection both of which were actually launched through feature drops, which I think is something you're also heavily involved in. How do you, you know, align all the work of all the teams making sure that, you know, all these things come together in a feature drop. It seems like a lot of planning is going into that.

Shenaz Zack: Oh, definitely. And it is a lot of effort. But it has been so exciting over the last, I think, few years that we launched Feature Drop and seeing how our users appreciate them.

But I think stepping back, one of the philosophies at Pixel that we have is that your device gets better over time. You know, you can feel like, oh, my device is not getting better. Your device continues to get better over time with features and updates, right? And so that is the philosophy we had when we started feature drops, apart from celebrating the features that we give our users and creating awareness, right? Again, like you said, we have a long list of features. We work on a long list of features, but how do you create that awareness for the user as well? That, okay, these are the new features that we just shipped, right?

And so we package them and even create awareness on the phone of all the features that we have shipped for like Night Sight, Quick Tap to Snap, Portrait Blur, so that, you know, users know that their devices are continuously gonna get better.

The analogy that I draw is celebrations. You have New Year's, but there's only one. But then you have your birthday, you have your anniversary, they are all these different celebrations in your life. And feature drops are like celebrations where we are helping you celebrate your phone by dropping features on a regular cadence rather than only when you get a new device. And that's the philosophy that, you know, the team worked on to constantly provide updates as part of feature drops.

Rachid: Yeah. So it's like Christmas four times a year, or actually, maybe eight times a year, if you take into account a Pixel watch, which also gets feature drops of course.

Rachid: Now, Shenaz, it's not long until Google IO. For those who didn't know it's on May 10th, that's when it kicks off. And those kinds of events really keep us at Google busy, like, you know, also with the Made by Google events that we have in October. So what is your role in events like that? Like what keeps you busy, sort of the final few weeks before we present things to the world?

Shenaz Zack: There's a lot that goes at the final mile, to be very honest. And more importantly, the attention to detail and that's another thing where I have my precious Pixel perfectionist. I try to spend a lot more time in attention to detail to make sure that the experiences that we are shipping to our users are ready for our users.

We know that there are certain fundamentals that have to be just right, in terms of product quality, battery life, connectivity and so we have to pay extra attention to these areas and to make sure that we are constantly improving on them. So it's just a busy time just getting everything as right as possible before people get it in their hands.

Shenaz Zack: That is, and then the excitement of the feedback we are gonna get from our users. It's like when you release that film and all of the initial ratings and reviews come out, it's so exciting. It's like a euphoric moment of like, when users get the phone and there's good and there is bad feedback obviously because, you know, everybody has a very different point of view in what they use. But it's just exciting to have that product in the hands of users and giving you feedback.

Rachid: That's incredible. So those events are busy in the runup, and then you get a lot of feedback and it's busy all over again. Of course.

Shenaz Zack: Yes. And that's the fun of it, right? Because you are constantly using your mind and challenging yourself and the team on how to build better products for everybody. And I am a user too. Like everybody's a user on the phone. I use my phone all the time too.

Rachid: Now, we close every episode with a top tip for our listeners. So do you have a favourite tip for one of our Pixel devices that you'd like to share?

Shenaz Zack: One of my favourite apps on the Pixel is the Recorder app. Because of the Recorder app, especially when you are doing interviews or when you talk in a meeting. You plop your phone down and tell people you're recording. But the Recorder just grabs the transcript whether you are offline, like even if you have no internet connection.

And just last year we shipped a feature called Speaker Labels, which now identifies the different speakers and says, speaker 1, speaker 2, speaker 3. And I think it is just so convenient to go look back and help you again, like, you know, rather than, oh my, what was that? You know, what did the interviewers say? I missed that. Just go back to the transcript and easily plop that transcript down with the speaker label.

So that's my top tip and that's something that I am very excited that the team worked on, and it was a tough problem to launch, but the team did it.

Rachid: Well, Shenaz, thank you so much for joining the final episode of this season of It Made by Google Podcast. Good luck with Pixel. Can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Shenaz Zack: Thank you. It was really good to be on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Rachid: Thank you.