How Google Cloud Business Platform Scales Culture & Performance Across 1,200 Distributed Team Members
What This Session Is About
Leading teams is hard. Leading distributed teams through transformation—without losing clarity, cohesion, or velocity—is even harder.
That’s the challenge Google Cloud Platform’s engineering leadership is tackling head-on. As the organization navigates a large-scale evolution in strategy and org structure, Engineering Director Todd Markelz, along with others in the leadership team, set out to do what most leaders only talk about: build a high-performance culture that actually scales.
Forget cookie-cutter playbooks. They’ve built a flexible system of team-based experiences that empowers managers to lead based on what their teams need most—while creating a shared language of trust, clarity, and collaboration across the org.
What You’ll Learn
How Google Cloud equips managers to foster deep trust and connection
Why tailoring development to each team’s maturity and context matters
How they’ve improved engagement and manager effectiveness scores
The system they use to scale culture without sacrificing local leadership
How they align 1,200 engineers, PMs, UXers, and program leaders globally
Who Should Attend
Engineering executives and senior leaders leading global, distributed, or cross-functional teams—especially those navigating transformation, growth, or reorgs.
Meet the Speaker
Todd Markelz is Engineering Director at Google Cloud, focused on building solutions that inspire and engage users throughout their journey of discovering Google Cloud Platform, or growing as a customer.
He is a long-time Googler and prior to working in Google Cloud he spent several years leading teams in the Search and Maps product areas building the local search experiences which is used by over billion users.