Starting a new job in NYC at 25 | Tech Strategy & Ops explained

[Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] 8 hours later just finished work up for the day it's a Friday afternoon and I am really excited to leave the office but some of you may notice that I am not in the BCG office and if you watched my recent vlog about my last day as a consultant you would know that I left my job at BCG where I was a strategy consultant for the past two years for those of you who are new here welcome my name is Matt I left my consulting job a few weeks

back but today's video is not about the past today's video is about the present and the future and so I'm actually filming this video right now from one of Google's New York City offices because yes I took a job as a strategy and operations associate and you may have never heard of strategy and operations before and so let me break it down to you right now okay so there's two things that I need to explain to you the first is what the hell is SN and then the second thing is how is Google organized and

the reason why the second question is important is going to be more clear after I answer the first question but with the first question which is what is SN SN is strategy and operations and I know some of you are probably like no duh but for those of you who don't know or if you're just curious the first piece of it is strategy the second piece is operations and I'm going to explain each of these strategy is what we think of when we hear about firms like mckin Bane or BCG my former employer the type

of work that they do so this is going to be very much high level work thinking working closely with management to think about key problems or questions for the business so these could be things like meta just launched a competing product how do we as Google respond to that or why is Google adds profitability declining what do we do about it how do we fix this or even should we invest more into self-driving cars or is it just a a waste of money and we shouldn't try to compete against Tesla it's questions like these that

are strategic and require structured thinking and problem solving and so I'm just going to put one more thing here which is that strategy tends to be very much long-term and so the focus and the lens that you take when you are developing a strategy tends to be a lot more longterm than in operations now operations most people tend to equate with the less sexy parts of running a business right like the operations of the day-to-day business and yes there is this component of it and so you'll have things like budgeting and planning which aren't really

the most sexy but are still needed to run the business properly but then there's another component to it which is execution and so this will be things like once we've developed the strategy and determined that hey we should do X Y and Z how do we actually get that done and how do we make sure that we're tracking the progress of whatever initiative we've decided on and making sure that we're hitting our targets that is all execution and so the reason why a lot of people that get hired into SN roles or former Consultants or

investment bankers is because in Consulting and in IB you get a very good understanding of business strategy you develop a very strong business sense you know how to back things up with data but also you become a beast at execution and so you can get done and really Drive results so what I'll put here is that operations tends to be a bit more near term in the sense of like strategy is much more forward-looking but operations has much more to do with like the day-to-day at a high level the combination of these two functions is

SN but the second question that I need to explain to you is how's Google organized because what you have to understand is that at a lot of these really large companies and specifically these really large tech companies there are many different SN teams and each team tends to be assigned to like a different product area or business segment and so if we think about Google as a company there's broadly speaking three main segments generalizing here but there's services there's cloud and then there's this thing called other bets and so when most of you think of

Google as a company you're actually probably thinking about things that fall under services and so this would be things like Google ads or YouTube yes YouTube is owned by Google or even search right the search engine and under Cloud you may have used something like Google Drive before right and so gws this stands for Google workspace anything that's related to to Google Sheets Google Slides Google Drive these all fall under cloud and there's also things like you know Cloud solutions for Enterprises Enterprise is just a fancy word for big businesses and then you have this

third segment called other bets and this is things that Google believes have one a high likelihood of failing but two a high likelihood of changing the world if any of these succeed and so these would be things like wh which is self driving cars you'll have Wing which is drone delivery and you'll even have stuff like capital G which is Google's own Venture Capital arm and I haven't even listed out every single business segment here but I hope this gives you a little bit of a better idea of how big of a company this actually

is and so the reason why you need individual SN teams to support each of these businesses is because a team that is intimately familiar with YouTube for example and has existing relationships with all of the key stakeholders of YouTube can be way more effective at driving the strategy and the execution of that strategy than you know a team that is say super high level and is trying to work across every single one of these businesses and so the other thing that we have to understand is the amount of Revenue that is brought in by each

of these businesses is not the same and the Lion's Share of Google's revenue actually still comes from ads greater than 75% of Google's revenue today comes from their ads business and so first and foremost Google is a ads company and my team specifically supports the ads business and so the main question that we focus on is how do we drive Google ad Revenue I've explained this to you in a very high level manner but I hope it at least gives you a better understanding of what the heck my new job is now I know some

of you are probably thinking so this sounds like a pretty interesting role but how do I know if this is the kind of job that I want to do and what I would say to that is there's really a few key reasons why someone would go into this kind of a role and for me personally it had a lot to do with the fact that in Consulting you rarely get to see the actual impact of the strategy that you develop and that's not to say that I don't recommend people going to Consulting I still highly

recommend it especially for students because it not only gives you a really useful toolkit to be just an absolute weapon in the workplace but it also just gives you a lot of exposure to many different companies and different Industries so you can learn what you actually like but I would say that over time that generalist model can become problematic and for me personally the lack of continuity in Consulting with not only the types of projects that I worked on but also the teams that I worked with was one of the reasons why I was so

excited to work with the same team on something that I find really interesting there's literally no one here on a Friday as I walk through I'm literally turning the lights on and I also want to thank a lot of you guys who watched my last video for just all the support and the encouraging comments that you sent because to be honest this transition although it may seem like it was incredibly planned out on paper it was honestly just a dream in my head for the longest time until just a few months ago and so in

my videos I really try to just be a bit more transparent and realistic with you guys because I don't want you to think that oh you have to be some crazy talented person to succeed in your career yes having the right skills and the work ethic has a big role in landing the job that you want but at the same time there is also an element of chance and a lot of uncertainty that often goes into the job hunting process that makes it really frustrating for a lot of people and so I just want you

to know that I also struggle and that I also went through the stress and the frustration of a pretty long and arduous job hunting process and I was just really fortunate to land this role where I am now no one no one no one ever [Music] knows where we heading where this story goes you just got to own undo your path what feels right in your heart and your soul I know you always want to do what's right I know you rather want to flight than fight but every now and then you got a part

ask yourself is this right then your grand