Google engineers organize around job security
The ranking news segment picked up on a Business Insider report that Google employees are organizing around job security rather than pay. The Alphabet Workers Union delivered a petition with more than 4,500 employee signatures to CEO Sundar Pichai’s office, calling for guaranteed severance, voluntary buyouts before mandatory layoffs, and an end to performance quotas the union says are unfairly enforced.
Hoar’s read was that the request itself is not unusual, just unusual for this workforce. “Who would have thought five years ago that some of the most highly educated people in the most profitable industry in the world would need job security?” he said. He drew a parallel to guaranteed contracts in professional sports and executive severance packages, arguing there is nothing inherently strange about negotiating job security into a compensation package. Beck agreed in principle but noted the practical limit: a blanket policy is a harder sell across a workforce as varied as Google’s, where a single senior engineer’s negotiating leverage looks nothing like an hourly worker’s. Both hosts flagged the irony of companies that talk about employees as their greatest asset until a policy has real cost attached to it.
A refresher: research is part of the process, not the decision
The main topic picked up directly from last week’s episode on the Paradigm B2B Combine. Hoar restated the core argument: research informs a platform decision, it does not replace the work of defining requirements, running a selection process, and choosing an implementation partner. “The single biggest mistake I see people make is they live in the eternal present,” he said, describing how companies often replace a platform reactively, based on what is wrong with the current one, rather than working backward from what the business needs three years out.
He returned to the doctor’s office analogy from last week, but with a twist. In the past, buyers behaved the way patients used to, taking whatever a single analyst or vendor told them at face value. Hoar argues that dynamic has shifted. “It’s a combination of the two now, where I think research sets context around it and helps you validate what you’ve already discovered,” he said. Buyers still need an expert’s judgment, but they are expected to show up informed.
Brennen Volbeda on selecting two platforms in nine months
Joining the conversation was Brennen Volbeda, Senior Director of Digital Experience and Strategy at PCNA, a supplier that decorates promotional products for retail brands and distributors. Volbeda has led digital experience at three manufacturers, including hand tool makers Tekton and JS Products before PCNA, and has run two platform selections in the last six to nine months: a PIM and PLM system, and a new AI-driven website search platform.
His process starts with analyst research to build an initial list of what is available, then moves to internal requirements before any vendor conversations begin. “We’re using analyst reports for at least initial review of what’s out there and what’s available,” he said. “Then we’re getting down to our requirements. We know what we’re looking for in the particular platforms.” Only after that does he bring in demos, calls, and partner references, including guidance from implementation partner Intara on the PLM search.
Proof of concepts have replaced the dog and pony show
Volbeda described a shift away from the traditional vendor pitch process toward hands-on validation before any contract is signed.
In the old days, you would bring people in, they do the dog and pony show, you have a dinner with them, and then you make a decision. Now it’s just shortlisting to who’s going to do the proof of concepts.
Brennen Volbeda, PCNA
That approach caught a real problem before it became expensive. PCNA had initially selected a PIM platform, but a proof of concept surfaced a data complexity issue tied to the volume of decoration-specific product information, sometimes hundreds of lines of data per item, that the platform could not handle as expected. The team reversed course before signing a full contract. On the AI search selection, PCNA is running two proofs of concept in parallel against the same data set to compare results directly rather than deciding from demos alone.
Designing search around real customer language
For the AI search initiative, Volbeda’s team is building use cases from actual customer requests rather than assumptions. The goal is natural language search that can hold multiple variables at once. “We want to bring that as the search,” he said, describing a customer request like needing a tumbler between twenty and thirty dollars for a thousand people for a finance industry event, rather than forcing a shopper to filter through a keyword search step by step. “You’ve got multiple context points there: product type, price, quantity, and industry, and still having the search give you the right results is really what we’re after.”
Where research fits, and where the network fits
Volbeda uses research and partner input mainly to validate decisions his team has already reached through its own diligence, particularly with brand partners who have used the platforms PCNA is evaluating. “It was really just validating our decisions at that point,” he said of feedback from retail brand partners already on the PLM platform PCNA selected. Beyond formal research, he relies on peer conversations at industry events, posts in the Master B2B forum, and direct outreach on LinkedIn to find people who have either used or evaluated a platform.
Hoar added a caution relevant to any buyer using reference calls or community feedback: make sure the platform being referenced is the current version.
Sometimes it’s like, oh, I’m on version nine point one, and then the references are from version seven point two, which doesn’t include the latest functionality.
Andy Hoar, Paradigm B2B
He treats version alignment as a basic diligence check before weighing any reference conversation.