How would you run the first 90 days after taking over Workspace

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Google is a consumer technology, ads, AI, and cloud company; its products include Search, YouTube, Android, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, Workspace, and Google Cloud.

You have just taken over as the product leader for Google Workspace with a focus on small businesses. Workspace includes products such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Meet, Chat, and related admin, billing, security, and collaboration experiences used by teams to communicate, create, share, and run daily operations.

In this execution interview, you are being asked how you would structure your first 90 days in the role. The emphasis is not on proposing a new feature, but on how you would quickly build context, identify the most important business and user problems, align stakeholders, and create an operating plan that can drive measurable progress.

Small businesses have distinct needs: they may lack dedicated IT teams, be highly price-sensitive, depend on simple onboarding and support, and compare Workspace against alternatives such as Microsoft 365, Apple’s ecosystem, and newer AI-powered tools. Your plan should reflect how you would operate inside a large global organization while serving a segment that values speed, simplicity, trust, and reliability.

The experience should consider:

- How you would diagnose the current state of Workspace for small businesses across adoption, engagement, retention, monetization, support, and customer satisfaction

- Which internal and external stakeholders you would meet, including customers, sales, support, marketing, engineering, trust and safety, legal, and regional teams

- How you would prioritize competing opportunities across core collaboration, admin simplicity, AI capabilities, pricing, onboarding, integrations, and ecosystem leverage

- What data, customer research, and operational signals you would use to separate urgent issues from longer-term strategic bets

- How you would sequence the first 30, 60, and 90 days, including learning, alignment, planning, execution, and decision checkpoints

- What owners, dependencies, and communication rhythms would be needed to move a cross-functional Workspace organization effectively

- How you would define go/no-go criteria, manage launch or roadmap risk, and handle trade-offs between speed, quality, privacy, reliability, and business impact

Your goal is to describe a clear, practical 90-day operating plan that shows leadership, structured execution, customer empathy, and sound prioritization in the context of Google Workspace serving small businesses.