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For years, Google’s primary tool for managing the company’s resources was a spreadsheet with a ranked list of the company’s top 100 projects, which was available for anyone to see and debated in semi-quarterly meetings.
These meetings were part status update, part resource allocation, an...
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There was no concept of or recognized need for longer-range planning than this;
if something more important came up, the engineers would figure it out and adjust the list.
The founders didn’t hire Eric for his business acumen as much as for his track record as a technologist (Eric was a Unix expert and helped create Java—the
the “gate-based” approach to building products,
which in most companies entails a series of well-defined phases and milestones, governed by various executive reviews, that escalate slowly up the corporate food chain. This approach is designed to conserve resources and funnel information up from far-flung silos to a small set of decision-makers.
Larry hated it. “Have you ever seen a scheduled plan that the team beat?” he asked. Um, no. “Have your teams ever delivered better products than what was in the plan?” No again.
“Then what’s the point of the plan? It’s holding us back. There must be a better way. Just go talk to the engineers.”
the engineers he was talking about weren’t engineers in the traditional d...
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Yes, they were brilliant coders and system designers, but along with their deep technical expertise many of them were also quite business savvy and ...
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Managing them by traditional planning structures wouldn’t work; it might guide them but it would also hem them in.
As experienced business executives, we had joined Google with the idea of bringing “adult supervision” to a chaotic place.
to realize that it was run differently than most any other place, with employees who were uniquely empowered, and operating in a new, rapidly evolving industry.
We also understood that the rules to guide us in this endeavor did not even exist yet, and they certainly couldn’t be found in the type of traditional business plan
Google would always offer higher-quality services and make those services easily accessible.
our foundation be built on users, and that more users would draw more advertisers.
Microsoft did aggressively challenge us, reportedly spending nearly $11 billion11 in an attempt to knock Google off its perch as a key player in the Internet search and advertising business.
We worked incessantly to make search better.
We added images, books, YouTube, shopping data, and any other corpus of information we could find. We created our own set of applications, such as Gmail and Docs, and made them all web-based. We improved our infrastructure by leaps and bounds, so that we could more quickly crawl an index of online data and content that was growing exponentially.12 We made search faster and available in more languages, and improved our user interface to make it easier to use. We added maps and better local results. We worked with partners to ensure that it was always easy for users to access us. We even
...more
And we monetized all of this with highly efficient and ef...
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Today Google is a $50-billion company with over forty-five thousand employees in over forty countries.
We have diversified from Internet search and search advertising into video and other forms of digital marketing, successfully transitioned from a PC-centric world to a mobile-centric one,
the plan we delivered to the board that day in 2003 wasn’t much of a plan at all.
When it came to management tactics, the only thing we could say for sure back then was that much of what the two of us had learned in the twentieth century was wrong,
and that it was time to start over.
Three powerful technology trends have converged to fundamentally shift the playing field in most industries.
First, the Internet has made information free, copious, and ubiquitous—practically everything is online. Second, mobile devices and networks have made global reach and continuous connectivity widely available. And third, cloud computing13 has put practically infinite computing power and storage and a host of sophisticated tools and applications at everyone’s disposal, on an inexpensive, pay-as-you-go basis.
From a consumer perspective, the convergence of these three technological waves has made the impossible possible.
What’s most astonishing is that these astonishing things aren’t astonishing at all.
Today, three factors of production have become cheaper—information, connectivity, and computing power—affecting any cost curves in which those factors are involved.
This can’t help but have disruptive effects.
Many incumbents—aka pre-Internet companies—built their businesses based on a...
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Now, though, these factors are abundant, lowering or eliminating barriers to entry and making entire industries ripe for change.
practically every industry is, at some level, information-driven.
energy… We can’t think of an industry that will escape this era unchanged.
The result of all this turmoil is that product excellence is now paramount to business success—not
consumers have never been better informed or had more choice.
It used to be that companies could turn poor products into winners by dint of overwhelming marketing or distribution strength.
The customer has abundant choice, with practically infinite digital shelf space
And the customer has a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril.
As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it.
In the new world, that inverts.”
The second reason product excellence is so critical is that the cost of experimentation and failu...
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It’s ridiculously easy to imagine and create a new product, try it out with a limited set of consumers, measure precisely what works and what doesn’t, iterate the product, and try again.
Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants,
but on the shoulders of lots of iterations.
The basis for success then, and for continual product exc...
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most management processes in place at companies today are designed with something else in mind.
They were devised over a century ago, at a time when mistakes were expensive and only the top executives had comprehensive information,
