Shuman Ghosemajumder is Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety at Google, where he manages product strategies to help protect their advertisers, partners & users.

He joined Google in 2003, and was one of the early product managers for AdSense, helping grow that business to over $2B in annual revenue. He is the recipient of two Google Founders’ Awards for extraordinary entrepreneurial achievement. He was previously a strategy consultant with IBM and McKinsey & Co. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

What is your role at Google?

I am a member of the product management team. I am Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, where I help create our product strategies to protect our advertisers, partners, and users. One area that I have spent a great deal of my time on is our systems which protect against click fraud, which is a type of fraud attempted on pay-per-click advertising systems such as Google AdWords. Google makes most of its revenues from AdWords advertisers, so protecting them and their return on investment is very important to us.

People in the industry and even members of the general public believe that technology always wins. Clearly it doesn't. Someone once said that the success of Google is largely a result of some brilliant marketing decisions early on, (some perhaps not so intentional), that allowed you the freedom to create cool technology. Do you agree with that statement?

I think most great success stories are a result of both skill and luck. We are fortunate to have some of the best talent in the industry, but we've also had our fair share of good luck. We're technology and product-focused as opposed to being marketing-focused; we think about how to design great products first and foremost. I think our low-key marketing approach has helped us because it lets the products speak for themselves. This is of course a general business trend, as companies are realizing that in the information age, slick advertising isn't a solution for bad product design. Companies like Apple, for example, have a similar approach. The new iPhone ads are essentially just product demos, but they're incredibly compelling.

What's your take on the popularity of social networking sites and user driven sites like Youtube and ebay?

The Internet has always been about access and interaction, so I see it partly as a continuation of a general trend which began when consumers first started using the Web in the '90s. Obviously the tools are getting better. Social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut let you interact with your friends more frequently and more effectively than email alone. The difference now is that everyone is becoming a publisher as well, as the content they create is public or semi-public by default.