I think he was referring to the mention that doodles are part of the money team, which sounds strange

Makes some sense - highly visible, probably short and unmovable deadlines. Just a different meaning of "money".

They make money from doodles??

They make happy users from Doodles. With Google's business model, happy users can be trivially converted into money.

(Technically, Google doesn't make money from Search or Android either, but they get happy users from them too, which can be trivially converted into money.)

Sorry I wasn't clear, yes I did mean to ask if Doodles were as high-pressure/high-reward an area as Ads and Android

Generally, yes. The challenges with doodles are:

1.) Absolute hard deadlines. Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday only comes around once; if you miss it, you missed it, and the doodle gets canceled.

2.) Big responsibility. You're the gatekeeper to Google's front door; if you screw up, a billion or so people will know it fairly soon.

3.) Ambitious quality standards, also because it's Google's front door. Some of the doodles are as big as ordinary projects at Google.

And on the plus side, your work is up on perhaps the most visited page on the Internet, and you have something really cool to talk about at parties. Plus the doodle team itself is really fun to work with and you have a lot of artistic latitude. It's probably one of the more startup-like areas in Google.