The BigQuery team recently marked the 10th anniversary of its launch with a fun commemorative video. As the founding product manager on BigQuery, sitting with the celebrations gave me a tremendous sense of pride in what the team accomplished. Used by thousands of companies large and small, BigQuery has become one of the most widely used cloud data warehouses in the world. And, with many petabytes of data under management, it has arguably done the most to bring big data analytics into the mainstream.

So it might come as a surprise to learn about BigQuery’s humble beginnings inside Google — fewer than 10 engineers for the first few years. To get BigQuery to where it is today, this tiny team relied on a single-minded focus on customers to navigate multiple potential pitfalls and swiftly bring a ground-breaking product to market. I thought I’d share the inside story on those early days — an incredible journey with a great team, and what led me to eventually start Switchboard.

The vision for cloud analytics

In 2010, a group of forward-thinking engineers in Google’s Seattle office took stock of Google’s groundbreaking internal storage, compute, and analytics capabilities — the same technologies used to crawl and index the entire internet. They imagined the transformative benefits these technologies could provide for companies going digital, and started to develop an external service layer that would eventually become Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A key pillar of this strategy was unleashing the power of web-scale analytics for regular companies without the need to build or manage their own massive data centers. The project codename…BigQuery.

The analytics core engineering team, Jordan Tigani, Siddartha Naidu, Jeremy Condit, Michael Sheldon, and Craig Citro, created the early proof of concept — a REST API — that outside users could use to tap into Google’s vast analytics power. I joined as the PM, using my pre-Google background in enterprise software to help the team define the product roadmap and path to market.

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