Shortly after I posted the “Interview with Marissa Mayer” entry, I received a comment from my friend David Eckoff (author of the original posts), informing me that he was just about to post Part 3 of his interview. He also reminded me our lunch in California during the 2007 PNME, which made me miss In-and-Out burgers tremendously — it used to be a frequent staple when I lived in San Diego…But I digress…
Anyway, I checked out his blog and realized that he’s not only got Part 3 up, but Part 4 as well. Part 3 talks about Google’s philosophy for Product Management and Prototyping and Part 4 talks about Small Teams and Leapfroging…
Once again, Marissa’s answers tied in very nicely with the previous topics on innovation and culture, reminding us of the holistic approach that drives Google’s innovation. Everything from the “top down AND bottoms up approach”, “launch early and iterate often based on feedback”, “20% time”, and “disrupter teams” are just a few examples. Here are some quotes from Part 3 and 4 of the interview…
Image by jwowens; from DavidEckoff.com
DE: Could you talk about the product management process at Google, how you go from idea to product, a high level overview?
MM: Every product has its own genesis. But we gather ideas from all over the company. Some of the ideas are top down…A lot of the ideas are bottoms up, engineers and other employees coming up with ideas and prototypes of what they’d want to build… We try to put a small team on it, sometimes a volunteer effort with what we call 20% time.
20% time is a notion we have at Google that we want employees to work on whatever they want to work on regardless of it is part of their core assignment with about 20% of their time… And then we launch it. We try to send it out to Google Labs as quickly as we can.
We try to launch early and often and then change the product, iterate it based on user feedback, adding more resources as something gains strength and popularity.
DE: What kind of return on investment do you see with 20% time?
MM: We call it 20% time, that’s our slogan that provides our employees with a creative license to know they are empowered to spend 20% of their time to do whatever it is they feel most passionately about. Because we believe it is that kind passion that creates really great and beautiful products. At the end of the day it’s about building something that you think will be particularly powerful.
What we’ve found is that often supports the core and gives us a disproportionate return on investment.
DE: If you were to go to work at a company more mature in it’s lifecycle, what would be your approach to innovation and new product development?
MM: I think 20% time, letting your employees know that you trust them and that they’re empowered to work on the things that they think could have the biggest impact on the business or that they think could be most impactful for the world is an important idea and I think works largely everywhere.
And there are key elements that we look at in terms of overall metrics and trends that you want to coach the organization towards. One of them is small teams… So there’s a conscious decision to sacrifice some element of quality and polish for the sake of doing more things and having more of a breadth of efforts going on… The other nice benefit this has is it keeps the culture much more entrepreneurial and much more motivated. Because when you’re working on a smaller team you have a much greater sense of ownership…So I think by creating a culture that has those small teams, you’re much more likely to get innovation… That’s true in start ups, that’s true in large companies.
And then there’s the concept of leapfrogging. We’ve noticed that as Google has matured as a company, some teams, while they may be structured in smaller teams within them, they’re large teams…What we’ve noticed there is when we add a small disrupter team, that’s supposed to think about things in a new and different way, two bad things happen.
One, the large, experienced, mature team wants to talk with the disrupter team, and say, “I know that seems like a good idea, because it seemed like a good idea to us too. But we tried it, and it was a waste of a year. So please, don’t bother to do that”… The other thing that happens is usually that big team is successful, and they have a lot of tools and infrastructure that the disrupter team wants to draft off of. So as a result, in a big company with a large successful team, it’s difficult for the disrupter team not to get sucked into the larger team over time.
We’ve had a bunch of attempts at leapfrogs, such as in search, with a team in Kirkland trying to build a better search engine than Google itself. And I’m not allowed to talk with them [laughter]. And that’s a good thing, because I know they’re wasting time.
I know they’re doing things we tried that just don’t work [laughter]… I’d love to talk with them and I’d love to save them that effort. But that very action of me doing that would ultimate change their outcome and change how disruptive they can be. So it’s really important that I not talk to the Kirkland search leapfrog and let them do their thing.
Again, you want to keep a small team. But you also want a disrupter to be far enough away that they don’t get overly influenced or voluntarily pulled into the larger, more successful team.
Personally, I believe that this is a case of driving innovation — particularly from the bottom up — by empowering people to pursue what they are most passionate about and creating an environment that encourages disruptive innovation.
How many of us in corporate environments can’t even get an idea heard/supported or have to deal with so many internal political channels that the idea itself ends up being the least of your concerns? We spend waaay too much time in meetings, avoiding toes that we shouldn’t step on, executing questionable plans from the top down, and trying to convince people who don’t (want to) understand the benefit of what you are proposing, that we don’t have time to actually do anything about the idea.
What if you told your boss that you were going to spend 20% of your time just working on an idea that you are passionate about that might benefit the company? What about just 10%? What if you said you’re going to work on the very same thing the larger group worked on and failed, but you’re going to do it different/better? Hmmm….Somehow, I don’t think it’ll fly…But that’s exactly the kind of thinking that drives the Google’s innovation factory.
Anyway, I apologize for the amount of quoted text in this post, but David’s “Interview with Marissa Mayer” series (Part 1, 2, 3, 4 so far) is so full of concise information that is filled with so much insight that it’s difficult to leave a lot of stuff out — I highly recommend giving it a read! And in case you didn’t see it before, you might also want to read my 2006 post on A License to Pursue Dreams: Google’s Innovation Equation.
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