A better 1:1 comparison is PM vs lead Engineer. They're at similar levels in the hierarchy.

There are idiosyncratic and systematic ways to consider this statement.

My personal belief is that it would be an easier path because I know myself to be very good at building products and supporting engineers, and relatively less interested in market research & networking.

In a more general sense, it's pretty easy to get a rough count of the number of product-oriented VPs at Google on LinkedIn, then count how many have PM backgrounds and how many came up through engineering (divided by the ratio of PMs to engineering managers). I did that analysis two years ago when I was considering Google, and it came up strongly on the side of engineer.

I'd be particularly interested to know if this has changed since, or if internal/better data suggests otherwise!

I suggest that once you get to the senior manager level on both tracks they generally start to merge as both become less focused on technical minutiae and more focused on product planning and execution. Eng directors [outside of pure research areas] have to be as market/business savvy as PM directors, for sure.

That's very likely true, but it doesn't say much about the relative access each has to a VP office.

You are saying Google has a lot of VPs without MBA and no product leadership experience, without any prior experience of having P&L responsibility, strictly engineering experience? Perhaps, but I am skeptical. I'd like to see the data on that.

If you restrict it to product VPs, it was true as recently as 2014.

The set of Google VPs has a representative sample on LinkedIn. Prove me wrong.

All the VPs who came through engineering that I found did so after having been early employees at one of the top tech companies. I buy that. But if you are going to climb the ladder now, I doubt you can do it through engineering at Google