Google Workspace

Google Workspace Web Content Strategy

From summer to autumn 2021, I assisted an amazing Web team at Google Workspace during a period of active release cycles for the product grouping formerly known as G Suite. I was excited to take on projects with Workspace, as I had been fascinated by some of the internal dogfood features I experienced years ago on a past project.

Why? In my opinion, Google Workspace has commercialized essential characteristics of how people at Google collaborate, communicate, and constantly push high-quality work forward. The product grouping prioritizes thoughtful productivity behaviors between Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Meet, Chat, and a number of other promising products. Now anyone can have powerful tools that guide collaborative work and help teams perform somewhat as Googlers do.

On the Google Workspace global website, a group of industry-facing pages aids how Google Workspace goes to market in specialized, sometimes highly regulated business areas. I’ve learned through work with many B2B clients that enterprise software, cloud, and infrastructure buyers bring a special set of regulatory considerations and skepticism to claims of ‘solutions’ they evaluate. At Google, I worked with several stakeholders in Marketing to craft a sectional experience strategy to help satisfy those buyers. Then I used the strategy to onboard design, content (PMMs and me), and development vendor teams so we could launch pages quickly and consistently.

Within this strategy I considered:

  • Competitive factors

  • A sense of revenue opportunity by sector

  • Presence of compelling use cases

  • Business priorities from PMM and Growth teams

  • Our ability to prove out use case claims with a through-line to more striking customer references, statistics, pull quotes, and longer-form content assets

  • Clearly communicated regulatory considerations and certifications (HIPAA, FedRAMP, others)

  • Lead capture and CRM requirements

  • Criteria for grouping or regrouping related industries with content overlaps (e.g., Retail/CPG, Healthcare/Life Science)

  • Opportunities for cross-referencing and highlighting Google Cloud services

Fun to see my work get top billing in the navigation ahead of a major developer conference!
(I may share other primary navigation updates in another case study once my work is in production.)

Pages impacted:

I found my background in B2B tech helpful as I got more familiar with the people, the org, and how things were resourced. I was deeply involved in design and development sprints. The PMM who wrote the content did a great job. The Web lead was an amazing program driver, unflagging standards-bearer, and a very cool dude.

We launched the first two pages prior to Google Cloud Next 2021, one of Google’s big developer and technical conferences where a compelling Google Cloud Services product for no-code app development was prominently featured.