Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

by John Doerr

Rethinking the Browser By then we’d set up something new for Google, a team to build client software. We had people working on Firefox to help improve Mozilla’s browser. By 2006, we were beginning to rethink the browser as a computing platform, almost like an operating system, so that people could write applications on the web itself. That fundamental insight gave birth to Chrome. We knew we needed a multiprocess architecture to make each tab its own process and protect a user’s Gmail if another application crashed. And we knew we had to get JavaScript working a lot faster. But we were up for the task of building the best browser possible. Eric Schmidt, our CEO, knew how hard it was to construct a browser from scratch: “If you’re doing it, you had better be serious about it.” If Chrome wasn’t going to be dramatically different and better and faster than the traditional browsers already on the market, there was no point in moving ahead. In 2008, the year of Chrome’s rollout, our product management team formulated a top-level annual objective that would have an enduring influence on Google’s future: to “develop the next-generation client platform for web applications.” The main key result: “Chrome reaches 20 million seven-day active users.”