How Google Public Sector’s RISE unit works: Show don’t tell

Google Public Sector's Rapid Innovation & Specialist Engineering (RISE) group is a bit of a vibe coding jazz band that aims to show customers what they can do via prototypes and then move it to production.

Projects have included a predictive subway car maintenance effort with New York City's MTA using Pixel devices, deploying Gemini for Child Welfare and scaling GenAI.mil. RISE builds rapid prototypes and then hands off to forward deployed engineers.

Google Public Sector formed RISE in January by merging its original Rapid Innovation Team and Specialty Engineering organization. The goal is to bring innovation and design thinking directly to the public sector, build prototypes that can quickly move to AI agent workflows and projects.

We caught up with Cameron Groves, Director of RISE, about the group's approach.

The approach. Groves said the goal of RISE is to bring the Google innovation culture directly to the customer. "It's not having a preformed thought or perspective of how they can solve the problem," said Groves. "We are more focused on the problem, hiring really smart people, and then going forward in terms of solving those problems and learning from them."

Groves said RISE aims to teach customers how to "embrace the chaos" via design thinking and other approaches that Google deploys. For instance, Groves said an intelligence agency wanted something like NotebookLM and RISE rebuilt it so it can be used in an air-gapped setting. "You can use AI to build a full-blown application that is now going to be adopted by our product team," said Groves.

In a nutshell, "Google is a jazz band," said Groves.

Show don’t tell. Groves said RISE is looking to show not tell when it comes to building a solution. Simply put, RISE builds working prototypes that can go to production. "You're going to get something tangible and a prototype you can take to production," said Groves. "The vibe coding era accelerated that. Now you can say, 'let me show you', and you go down the path of show not tell."

Groves added:

"With one technical program manager and one full stack software developer you can run a series of experiments through two or three sprints. You see the customer light up."

The projects for RISE are wide ranging and Groves said there's a big backlog of projects designed to meet the customers where they are.

Differences with forward deployed engineers. RISE sounds a bit like an FDE org, which also sits under Groves at Google Public Sector. Groves said there isn't conflict because the two groups are distinct. "FDEs are about the last mile and will be on site a lot. RISE doesn't want a person to be on site permanently. That's not their role. RISE is scoping the problem and showing you what's possible," said Groves.

What makes a good customer, prototypes and documentation. Groves said sometimes RISE engagements will be put on the back burner when there are customers "doing innovation tourism or lacking a vested interest or there are conditions where they lose interest." Even if a project doesn't work out with one customer, it can be used elsewhere. All knowledge from a project and code is put into a repository, or AI recipe book, which can be deployed later.

"I'm maniacal with the team. Everything has to be posted because someone else may have the same problem you did and can take something off the shelf and run it," said Groves. "That includes the code, the presentations, recorded demos and things like that."

Sometimes customers don't work out because budgets can derail engagements. Groves said RISE may have solved a problem but budgets do change as do leaders. "These things certainly happen, but we now have an asset we can take to other entities," added Groves.

For instance, a prototype using Gemini to improve an unemployment claim may apply to medical insurance too. "Just because it may not work for that one customer, doesn't mean it can correlate to another," Groves said.

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The importance of repeatability. Groves said RISE aims to build in repeatable processes in prototypes upfront. "I was always asked this from business leaders: How do you scale the repeatable things that you solved because they're really hard problems? Well, we built that in. Like one of the design principles of the organization approach was like building repeatability up front," said Groves.

Hiring talent. Groves said RISE is looking for the obvious hard skills and ability to solve problems algorithmically, but there are a lot of intangibles he looks for.

He explained:

"You have be able to algorithmically solve problems and have the element of curiosity. The biggest one is entrepreneurial. Somebody who is intellectually curious and is not going to say no to anything in the sense of the problem that's in front of them. You're able to see things as someone talks about them, and see and be able to visualize almost to the point that you can build it within hours."

How do you hire for that? Groves said:

"There are signals in a conversation when you interview somebody, mainly around the elements of what are your career moments. You start to realize that someone has some emotional intelligence, which is really what I'm talking about through this entrepreneurial piece of it, yet has this hard skill of doing software and algorithmically solving problems at scale. Maybe you combine those two, you have somebody who also can be an FDE, right? Someone who can be just a prototyper, and now they can do a lot of really good things. There are those intangibles you see in people, and that's what I live for."