Transcript

Ryan 00:00:00 But also the capabilities. Even something simple like Google Maps, you kick off Google Maps navigation on your phone. Now your watch is showing you your next turn right there in your tile. I think that's maybe the shift that is not just a wearable, it's your all day companion.

Voiceover 00:00:17 Welcome to the Made by Google podcast, where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host, Rachid Finge.

Rachid 00:00:26 Today we're meeting Ryan Krems, a product manager who joined Fitbit back in 2015 and now works on Pixel Watch.

Voiceover 00:00:34 This is the Made by Google Podcast.

Rachid 00:00:36 Ryan, you've been working on wearable devices for a decade. What excites you about them?

Ryan 00:00:42 Those that are in the space really have a strong passion for it. You feel it in every part of the organization that you work in. You have everything from low level engineering, UI designers, RF engineers. It really takes an entire village of individuals to bring these wearable devices to the marketplace. And over this time, the wearables, I would say, are on that cutting edge of complexity of functionality.

Rachid 00:01:14 People always tell me hardware is hard, and then it seems to me that the wearables are the hardest of them all. Is that because of the size or are there other things that make them maybe the hardest thing to work on?

Ryan 00:01:24 Yeah, I think it’s definitely the size. If you think about the battery capacity, the fact that it's not plugged in, you know, we have batteries on the order of 300 milli milliamps, maybe 500 milliamps for some of the larger products that you see in the marketplace. That's a very constrained environment and you're trying to do a lot, you're trying to push the boundaries of every part of the system to bring that high polish, high engagement, high value product to the user. You know, you see a lot of roll off from the phone ecosystem. So we, you know, we've been able to ride that curve from a price, a capability perspective, but the form factor is small. It's constrained. You want this product to be able to be worn for the full day and the night.

Rachid 00:02:16 Now, Ryan, what if we wind back the clock for 10 years? You're a fresh-faced product manager at Fitbit. I think it's Fitbit Flex, sort of where you, where you came in. Yeah. What if you compare that device to the current Google Pixel watch? Yeah. Like what changed in that decade?

Ryan 00:02:33 So when I joined Fitbit, their products in the marketplace was Flex Zip. They had just released Charge HR and Surge. So the first products with on-device heart rate, and really the focus for those products was about health sensing. So a lot of work, a lot of focus on multi-day usage and all day tracking. You know, getting your step count, your heart rate. If you think about the on-device experience, relatively limited, you know, flex may have just had LEDs, you know, charge HR had, you know, a single line display. You press a button, you cycle through your stats. When I came into Fitbit, I was specifically focused on Fitbit Surge. Our first major software update was to bring the bike exercise mode to bring notification support to the product. So, you know, what we really take for granted in the current day, that transition from really just quantified self health tracking to a fully featured smartwatch that really has capability and experience that users expect from their phone. It's their all day companion. When I think about our development style in the Fitbit days, you know, the entirety of the team would fit in one small meeting room, right? It's like all, all software engineers, all designers in one room. Now when you think of the fully featured smartwatch, it's leveraging a large part of fully featured Wear OS operating system that has its own large teams to bring that product and that baseline to market.

Rachid 00:04:16 You mentioned Wear OS, I wanted to get back to that. Yeah. How would you describe what it is and how does it relate to the Fitbit experience?

Ryan 00:04:24 Wear OS is the baseline operating system for our smartwatch. The great analogy is the Pixel phone and Android, right? Right. Android is powering the Pixel phone Wear OS is powering the Pixel watch. And then on top of that, we're bringing unique differentiated experiences either through modifications at the very low level software, we have our own algorithms that are running below the operating system and we're then surfacing all of that through Fitbit from a health and fitness perspective. But you also have a much richer set of productivity apps that come along with Wear Os through the app ecosystem. So think of things like Gmail, you also have Google Calendar, Google Pay, you have a rich set of apps that are then brought on top of the operating system to, you know, really drive your productivity suite your day-to-day usage.

Rachid 00:05:24 So you're a product manager. What are the kind of decisions you get to make for the Pixel Watch and for the Fitbit experience on them? What is an example of maybe the decision you took for over the past few months?

Ryan 00:05:36 One of the reasons why I love the job is that you have such a wide range of engagements and decisions to be work through as a team. It's very rare that these are individual decisions, but more about bringing the experts in the room, bringing all the points of view together, and they're very wide ranging. In any given day, you have to work across a multi-year time span. You have to get very micro, okay, is this issue that we're seeing in our backlog where we do very comprehensive testing, whether that's accuracy, validation for our low level algorithms, whether that's our internal dog food population that's using the end-to-end experience and providing us feedback. So we are reviewing all of those types of issues determining, you know, are these must do, must fix issues? Do we need to reprioritize the teams to address any of these concerns we have inbound from our users?

Ryan 00:06:43 I mean, love getting direct feedback from our customers and understanding their concerns, their pain points. How do we get those addressed in the same day? We'll have then discussions on what are the key decisions that we're making for products coming 1, 2, 3 years out in the future, right? We need to change our horizon from the today and the immediate to the multi-year window because every decision that we make has lasting consequences, right? We are really sweating the details on every interaction, every touch point that the user has with the product. How does the user engage with the Crown on the Pixel watch? Mm-Hmm, what is the, from a hardware team perspective, they're looking at what's the torque on that? What's the turn rate rate? How is the UI responding to that? How are we doing this in an efficient way, a power efficient way? How are we bringing to life that product? You know, anytime the user's engaging with that product, they're, they're getting a little bit of delight, you know, finding those small moments.

Rachid 00:07:54 You mentioned 10 years ago you were working on things like notifications or continuous heart rate tracking that we take for granted right now. Yeah. Are there things that Google Pixel Watch does today that you couldn't have foreseen when you started at Fitbit 10 years ago?

Ryan 00:08:09 Just thinking about the raw capabilities that we have on the Pixel watch today. I think in a lot of ways we need to hold ourselves back. I mean, we have the capabilities of a phone several years ago, and I think that's maybe the inspiring and exciting aspect of it is that really we are not bound by device capabilities any longer. When I was starting at Fitbit, and even you find small moments still now within Pixel Watch, but in those early days we were fighting for bites. We might need to rearchitect the large aspects of the software to free up bytes to bring a new software update. Now we're working on the order of gigabytes, right? Right? And that just opens up this wide range of, of opportunity.

Rachid 00:09:01 What if I ran into you in 2015, I told you, Hey Ryan, in 10 years time there is a wearable that will detect if you fall and it will call emergency services for you when you're in trouble. What would you have said then? Would you have felt like that's totally in the realm of capability down that line? Or, or did it go much faster than, than you would've anticipated?

Ryan 00:09:21 The full 360? The layering of core user journeys that we are able to bring on Pixel Watch today. Maybe that's what would surprise me, is like the depth of experience that we're able to go in each area to where it's not just a feature, it's not just a line on the box. It's fully flushed out. It's each experience is a full end-to-end experience that ties together both the on wrists experience, the mobile touch points. I would've been impressed because, you know, in a lot of ways that amount of polish and thought that you're able to bring with a larger team, of course helps with that , but also the capabilities. Even something simple like Google Maps, you kick off Google Maps navigation on your phone, now your watch is showing you your next turn right there in your tile. I think that's maybe the shift that is not just a wearable, it's your all day companion.

Rachid 00:10:26 And that is because it has so many features that can be useful all day. Um, I myself love it for health and sleep tracking and during workouts at the same time, some people could be worried that they also could be distracting maybe because of notifications, for example. So how do you ensure that Pixel Watch doesn't overwhelm for those people?

Ryan 00:10:44 Yeah, you know, I think that's really the great thing about the device is that I think of it as a continuum. We have mechanisms for users to, you know, really tailor to their needs. Maybe I want it to be less distractful. We have do not disturb modes. We have the ability to silence all the notifications. We have the ability for the user to use the mobile companion app to select those apps that they want to be informed of. It goes everywhere from the watch face. That's one thing that, you know, you always take a step back and think about those core, core use cases for the watch. And it's like, how do you make it yours, right? So yeah, if I think about this, the watch faces, we have a wide range of watch faces that come with the device. We also have a huge catalog of third party develop watch faces within the play store that the user can get. The things that delight me is like the configuration, the customization that a user can do, right? You may see 10, 20 clock faces available to you, but each one of those clock faces can be fine tuned by the user to make it just theirs, right? So everything from color scheme, number of complications. If you think about some of the analog clock faces, does it have tick marks? Do you want large numerals? Do you want, um, zero complications? Do you want eight complications?

Rachid 00:12:17 So would you mind telling us what's on the product manager's watch and what's the watch face there? Are you like an analog kind of guy or more of the digital numbers? Lots of complications, not too many

Ryan 00:12:27 Question. Yeah, I think I mix it up almost on a daily basis. You know, what I have right now is analog bold. So, but I do a pretty customized version of analog bold where I change the font of the numerals, right? Load up a couple complications for heart rate steps and the calendar. It's almost like what mood strikes you, right? So it could be analog bold, it could be simple like big time, right? It's just like, I just want to have the time. I'm just out walking the dog. I wanna swap it over. And I think also color, that's maybe, maybe it's because we're in a space in the development environment. All of our coworkers are also having watches on their wrists. And so it's like how do you differentiate it? The other thing for me is just like, like the always on display has to be on. Like, I am an always on display individual. I want that time to be available at a glance where I don't need to look at my watch, right? It's like I can have my wrist turned slightly, I can be looking, you know, out of the corner of my eye and catch the time.

Rachid 00:13:38 So as you mentioned, you're already working on, you know, what the future could bring, could look like. I cannot obviously ask you, you know, what the future holds, but I'm just in general wondering like what direction are wearables going into, do you think in the, in the next few years as you mentioned, you know, it, it's not any longer about hardware capabilities, maybe it's much more about restraining ourselves and then making sort of the right choice in, in taking the right direction. What excites you?

Ryan 00:14:07 I look at continual advancements for health and fitness related aspects. The watch continues to be one of those few devices that is on your body, right? It's on you continually. It has that unique opportunity to then monitor your health, right? And so I see continued advancements in that area and those advancements may come from brand new features. It could come from increased accuracy, those level up to really some true value ads, which is like improving individual's health. I think the other one is as we look to some of the advancements coming throughout the ecosystem, how are we able to predict or contemplate what the user may be looking to do? Bring that to the forefront.

Rachid 00:15:05 Now, Ryan, one question I love to ask all the guests on the Made by Google podcast is their top tip for the listener. So I'm sure many of our listeners have a Pixel Watch. What is one thing or feature you feel they should try out?

Ryan 00:15:19 Yeah, I think one thing that I would have our users try out, you know, we, we announced that there with Pixel Watch 2 would be Safety Check. I think that's mm-hmm, you know, a great feature there for peace of mind. You know, say you're, you know, walking home late at night, you want to kick off a Safety Check, check in with, you know, your partner or your friend. That's very easy to do in a discreet fast way on the watch, it leverages the phone experience as well. So, you know, set up a tile, you know, have that quick access and you know, feel a little better in those moments.

Rachid 00:15:55 And what it does is that it will alert a friend family if you're not checking in within a certain time to say you're safe, right?

Ryan 00:16:05 Correct. You define your emergency contact in the situation, you set a duration and if you're not checking in within that duration, it'll start alerting you on the wrist. And if you're, you know, not checking in against that alert, it will then, you know, send a, send a notification to that individual that you didn't check in and, uh, you know, append your location along with that.

Rachid 00:16:28 That's a great innovation, something people definitely should try out. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on to the Made by Google podcast and hope to have you again soon. Yeah.

Ryan 00:16:36 Thanks so much.

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