When Tris Warkentin was 21 years old, he made a decision that both proved and nearly broke him. As a senior at Kenyon College, he committed to completing a triple major in Psychology, Philosophy, and German Literature, with two honors programs while working 80-hour weeks at a tech job. For months, he survived on power naps alone. He got conjunctivitis twice in two months. His body was sending clear signals: stop.

He didn't.

"I just absolutely refused to not do the things that I wanted to do," Tris recalls. 

Today, as Director of Product Management, Deep Mind at Google, Tris has transformed that relentless drive into something more sustainable: a philosophy of building great things with people he loves, tempered by the wisdom of knowing how to balance persistence with purpose.

Early Indications of High Slope

Tris's journey into tech began long before Google, even before he could legally sign his own employment contract. He graduated high school a semester early, and at age 17, he took a job doing technical writing at iPhrase Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"The first code I was ever paid for writing was Python code that parsed grammar files," he explains. It was the early 2000s, and this natural language search engine startup was born from MIT's Media Labs. For a teenager, it was transformative. "I knew at that moment I would have a lifelong belief that AI would change the way that we interact with computers and that it would be transformative for what humanity can achieve during my lifetime."

What made that moment stick wasn't just the technology. It was the realization that he was a total knowledge sponge. In his first week, his manager David went on vacation and handed me the manual for Adobe Framework and asked him to “just do what you can”. Tris wrote 400 pages the two weeks he was away. And David returned, he was floored. Floored is what happens when you encounter High Slope Talent.

"The knowledge sponge idea [from PEAKS] is one that really resonates with me," he says.

"I aspire to be a lifelong learner. It's so core to my personality, this desire to know and this desire to understand how things work."

Ask how an internal combustion engine works, how aspirin functions, or what makes a plane fly, and Tris will probably give you a reasonable explanation regardless of the field. "I see this across a lot of people that I would consider to be high slope talent. They're just driven by that knowledge."

Mission: Possible

Tris's Google career experiences are impressive: five years in ads working on optimization science, to becoming leading the Product team on TensorFlow, to leading product for Google Brain including LaMDA (yes, the one that sparked the "sentient AI" controversy) and Bard, to co-founding PathAGI and the Gemma models program that now powers on-device AI for Android.

But despite this trajectory, he's clear-eyed about what success actually means to him.

"I have a strong belief that almost everybody should have a mission," he explains. "That mission should be durable and should last for at least a 10-year span and should be applicable to both life and your career."

He developed his own mission in his late twenties: “Build great things with people I love.”

"People are afraid of the L word, the love word. But I think it's important. You spend so much of your life at work and in your career, you better love the people."

This mission isn't an abstract philosophy for him, it’s a decision mechanism. When ChatGPT sparked the AI hype cycle, the priorities for Bard as a product shifting toward navigating the changing landscape over building great things, Tris made a hard choice. Despite being the first PM on Bard, despite naming it, he stepped away to co-found PathAGI and lead the open source Gemma models program. 

"I really try to directly apply building great things with people that I really care about as work sorting principles. Not just as an abstract thing, but as a way that you can actually say, hey, should I do this or should I do that?"

On Persistence, Relationships, and Trust

Tris subscribes to pithy quotes about resilience and other topics that keep him going like: "It'll be okay in the end. Otherwise, it's not the end" and (maybe) Eisenhower's, "When you're going through hell, keep going." It’s his deep belief in these quotes that aligns to his core value of persistence (and a principle of PEAKS).

Earlier in his Google career, he worked on a notoriously difficult project. A billion-dollar product growing 100% quarter over quarter, but with multiple people quitting every week. His engineering partner literally apologized for the getting assigned to "worst project at Google" on his first day.

The project was brutal. His engineering director struggled deeply with the stress. But they turned it around. They launched it. It was considered such a success that Google replicated it three more times.

To Tris, the real success was not just the product achievement of sticking the landing, it was also the relationships. "The eng(ineering) director who would cry on daily one-on-one walks? She's now one of my best friends in the world. For life, you're bonded."

When that director later led Google Brain, she brought Tris in to work on TensorFlow. "I do not think I would have come to Brain had I not had that relationship with her."

"You have setbacks," Tris reflects, "but turning setbacks into relationships and things that will power the rest of your career and the rest of your life, that's the real persistence play."

How to Build High Slope Teams

For High Slope Teams to achieve leadership success, Tris highlights two vital components: curiosity and trust. Working at Google means being surrounded by impressive people who genuinely care about building great products. But he's learned something crucial about growing into bigger leadership roles: "Your value is not based on what other people think about you. Your value is on what you can do." Even being underestimated is an opportunity to build trust. 

That said, not all leaders coming into a new team take these opportunities. Some miss a critical component to success in showing value, they forget to be curious. Tris notes the common truth: most organizations have problems to solve. Too often, a leader rushes in with an obvious, self-serving solution to "fix" a problem and claim success. This is shortsighted.

"That team is full of people that know what they're doing and are trying hard to do the right thing. And it's 0% probability that glaringly obvious idea X hasn't been considered and roundly rejected for some reason," he explains. "Before you try to make changes for things that seem like obvious problems, you have to understand the reasons. You don't have to agree with them. You don't have to like them, but you’ve got to understand them."

This understanding matters because new leaders often face a natural tension: the pressure to make an impact quickly versus the need to build trust through curiosity. Some respond by being reactive, proposing changes before fully grasping context. Others focus heavily on organizational structure, believing that getting the org chart right will solve everything.

"There's this trap in large corporate America that if we just get the org right, everything will happen that's good," Tris observes. But structure alone doesn't create success. "If the people that are going to do the work aren't motivated and they're not doing the right thing, then it's not going to be successful."

Tris’s best managers understood this balance between curiosity and action. They role modeled high slope behaviors for him too. His first manager, David, gave Tris trust and autonomy by going on vacation during his first two weeks on his first job. Later, one of his managers at Google, Kamal, taught him emotional grounding through example. "He's one of these people that when things really go wrong, he's very grounded and he is very action-oriented. Seeing how effective the way he approached it really changed my leadership style." Knowledge sponges learn through freedom and access to great resources, you don’t need to do much else.

Tris’s Future Slope Story

Despite the fact that the PEAKS framework resonated for Tris in how he lives and works, he debated the very idea of “slope” with me. "Slope implies that there's a summit that you should reach. Should I want to be Google CEO? I would put it to you that it would not match my life mission. I think I would have much more trouble building great things with people I love as CEO."

Tris doesn’t believe his growth has ever plateaued or will. "Have I felt like I've stopped trying to grow as much as I could? No. I don't think I have it in me."

Today, Tris is working on "super intelligence in your hand," making AI personal. He's focused on scaling AI to humanity: "You might have heard about the year of agents. But you probably haven't had an AI that ordered you a pizza or got a ride to the airport. But it's all very much possible. How do we scale that to humanity?"

When asked about his current slope, he reframes the question: "What does it mean to succeed in life is something that everybody should define for themselves. I feel like right now I'm on a higher slope than I've ever been from my personal mission" standpoint.

To learn more about Tris Warkentin and his work: Check out People of AI podcast.

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