Google Goes Globe-Trotting

Tokyo's legendary electronics district, Akihabara, is the staging ground for the first of several competitions held during the trip, ostensibly to sharpen the product knowledge, business skills and street smarts of the APMs. They are broken up into teams and given $100 to buy the weirdest gadgets they can find. Diving into stalls full of electronic gizmos, they find things like a USB-powered smoke-removing ashtray and a stubby wand that, when waved back and forth, spells out words in LED lights. The latter proves the eventual winner. "For three years, a team has bought this gadget," says Mayer. "But this is the first time someone has managed to get it to work."

The instant their plane arrives in Beijing, the APMs pull out their BlackBerrys—which hadn't worked on Japan's communication system. Google runs on instant communication, and the typical APM gets hundreds of e-mails a day, with no hours off-limits.

When the APMs finally lift their heads, they come face to face with the realities of doing business in China. As explained by the head of Google here, Kai-Fu Lee, balancing the company's freewheeling style with China's government rules—and censorship—is a delicate balance.

At the Google office, the APMs conduct interviews with local English-speaking consumers. It's striking how effective the Chinese government has been in tilting the playing field to benefit the home team, Baidu.com, by occasionally blocking access to Google's site and by insinuating a nationalistic element into the choice. The message gets across: "Baidu knows more [about China] than Google," a young man wearing a Brasil Soccer shirt says matter-of-factly.

On the bus back to the hotel one night after a dinner featuring donkey meat (surprisingly tasty) and deer tendon (yuk), APM Frances Haugen conducts an informal survey of her colleagues. A surprisingly high percentage have skydived. Most seem to have parents who teach at universities (as was the case with Brin and Page). Haugen, from Iowa City, is herself the daughter of a biologist. She heads the team that analyzes customer results for the multibillion-dollar Google AdWords product, which places sponsored links on search-results pages. Only at Google would such a job be entrusted to a 22-year-old. She had to coordinate a staff of almost 20, including 11 engineers. "It was very hard for me. Some of them are twice my age. Being a product manager is like herding cats." The intense responsibility is something they all must deal with. Prem Ramaswami, the 25-year-old APM who "owns" Google Checkout (an online-payment application), recalls telling his father about his job and encountering utter disbelief. "They can't possibly be letting you do this," his dad said.

Google helps APMs to cope by supplying a support structure. Each has an APM "buddy," a mentor and an outside management coach: "It's like a therapy session," says Nick Baum, 24, the APM for Google Reader, which organizes feeds from users' favorite Web sites and blogs. Eventually the APMs learn the secret of leading a team of world-class engineers that they can't boss around—what an early APM calls "charismatic authority." The idea is to make yourself helpful to the engineers and gather hard data (much more useful than rhetoric at Google) to back up your vision of where the product should go.