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Missed Management

I saw Eric often in his first weeks. He seemed to spend much of his time roaming the halls with a bemused look on his face, as if he couldn't believe he'd actually joined this company populated with big rubber balls and lava lamps and scruffy animals sleeping on couches—sometimes with the pets they had brought to work lying next to them.

Usually when I saw Eric he had company. One day it was Governor Howard Dean. More than once it was Al Gore. Gore apparently had plenty of free time on his hands. I ran into him everywhere.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Vice President," I said to the tall man standing at the urinal next to me as I took a break between meetings. That experience pretty much dissipated any residual sense of awe.

When Eric and Al stood outside my office chatting about Gore's interest in creating a new independent TV network, I ever so gently nudged the door closed with my foot. I had work to do.

I wasn't sure about Eric. No one seemed to know what he was doing, since Larry and Sergey were still making all the decisions. Other than the purchase-order edict, we didn't hear much from him for a while, perhaps because he didn't officially add the title CEO until August 2001.

Eric did add transparency to the decision-making process, forcing discussions in public meetings so everyone could see the sausage being made, even if we didn't always like the ingredients stuffed into it.

"In a culture which is consensus driven," Eric explained to reporter Fred Vogelstein in November 2005, "the trick is to have everybody participating in the decision and make sure everybody has been heard."* That wasn't true at Google before Eric came onboard. As one drifting into a more distant orbit around the stars of our universe, I appreciated Eric's efforts to shed light on a process that all too often took everything in and let nothing out. That support for transparency led me to view him as an ally, a friend of marketing, and a voice of reason.

A month before Eric could implement his ideas as CEO, Google's top-down decision-making reached its peak—and its nadir. Larry decided that July to reorganize the engineering group. It didn't go well. Our founders cut bureaucracy the way they cut costs—with a cleaver instead of a paring knife.

Larry trusted his newly minted product managers (PMs), Salar and Susan, and the two new hires, John "J.P." Piscitello and Pearl Renaker, who joined them in April 2001. They all reported directly to him. He was less happy about the half-dozen project managers who had been working with engineering for months. Project managers created timelines, allocated resources, and prodded engineers to ensure products shipped on schedule. They conducted performance reviews and kept people like me from bugging the technical staff with requests that might slow things down. They also acted as a buffer between the engineers and the executives, or as systems engineer Ben Smith described it, "shielded their employees from random shit that came from above." In a company like Google, standing between the founders and the engineers did not earn you a sash and a spot on the homecoming float.

I liked the project managers. More important, I needed them. They were our contacts for any task requiring technical resources, such as evaluating vendors or tracking the performance of our banner ads. The project managers assigned engineers to work with us—engineers who were under great pressure and would not normally consider a marketing task important enough to add to their to-do lists.

Wayne Rosing joined Google in late 2000, and in January 2001 took over as VP of engineering, replacing Urs Hölzle, who, as the first Google Fellow, went off to solve large-scale operations issues caused by our rapid growth (things like energy consumption and efficiency across hosting centers). Wayne had an avuncular manner and a Charlie Brownish appearance that he subverted by occasionally sporting a diamond-stud earring