Greg Backstrom

About Greg Backstrom

Experienced Senior Product Manager (Google L6) specializing in GenAI and LLM-powered solutions, delivering scalable, AI-driven products to 100M+ users across web and mobile platforms. I’ve led the development of impactful features like AI-generated summaries and innovative and intuitive user experiences that solve complex problems.Skilled in defining vision and strategy, translating user feedback into actionable roadmaps, and collaborating across research, engineering, and design teams to deliver user-centric, high-impact products. Passionate about shaping the future of AI-driven experiences to make AI indispensable in daily life.Educational Background: Berkeley Engineering, Harvard MBA.

Experience

1. Senior Product Manager

   Google

   Jan 2018 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   Senior Product Manager — Google Maps & SearchScope: Unlock UGC and other geo data to power next-gen, AI-driven local discovery across Google. Define long-term vision and strategy, set guardrails, and enable conversational AI across Maps, Search, and Gemini.• Strategy & platform: Created a streamlined, privacy/safety-reviewed path for GenAI experimentation, materially reducing time from idea to approved pilot.• Data for models: Partner with Search/Gemini/Geo to deliver compliant, high-quality datasets for pre-training and evaluation (provenance, consent, PII handling, licensing).• Flagship launches: Enabled AI summaries for Places and improved Place Answers; rolled out to a 9-figure user base with single- to low-double-digit lifts in decision quality, engagement, and task completion, while holding sub-second p95 latency and lowering unit inference cost.• Evaluation & safety: Built the end-to-end eval framework, including groundedness/factuality, coverage, helpfulness, and safety, golden sets, LLM autorater, and online A/B testing.• Governance & compliance: Drove GDPR/DSA/DMA reviews, data minimization, and content governance; reduced policy-violation exposure and standardized launch criteria across surfaces.• Leadership: Connector/advocate for proper UGC use; led ~20 cross-functional partners (Eng, DS/ML, UX, Trust & Safety, Legal/Privacy) across SF & Tokyo; own AI roadmap/OKRs and standards adopted by multiple teams.AI / LLM product skills: Evaluation design; RAG & retrieval quality; A/B testing; LLM-as-judge; prompt/orchestration; post-gen verification; safety/guardrails; cost/latency optimization; multilingual coverage; privacy/compliance by design.

Education

• University of California, Berkeley

  Bachelor's Degree, Mechanical Engineering

• Harvard Business School

  Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.)

Skills

• Product Development
• Leadership
• UX
• Marketplaces
• Venture Capital
• Mobile
• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• User Experience
• Start-Ups
• Strategy
• Platforms
• Business Model Validation
• Product Management
• Agile Methodologies
• Project Management
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Customer Development
• Html
• Ruby on Rails
• Growth
• User Research
• Entrepreneurship
• Sql
• Javascript
• User Interface Design