I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [132]
"So ... this page went up on short notice," Marissa explained to us. "Someone came up with the idea at lunch yesterday. Urs presented it to Jen McGrath and me, and we put it in the product review. Larry liked it and informed EStaff. A few hours later it was on the site. Sorry for not giving more notice, but opportunity was short, since his trip is elapsing by the day and we've already missed half of it."
Ah, it was an engineering thing.
"Chad's trip is very cool," Marissa insisted. "We wanted to be supportive and we realized that people might find this of interest." The page included a map showing Chad's general location and offered Google t-shirts to anyone who captured his image and sent the photo to us.
Adding something nonessential to the homepage in the middle of the night struck me as unnecessarily rash. "Given our propensity to test every small modification we make to the UI," I argued in response, "this feels like a fairly significant change to make with no discussion at all. I don't think it's a bad thing to honor Chad or to have a fun promo line on the homepage. But since this particular one involves PR, customer service, and our brand, I wish that Cindy and I had been consulted first. It's unlikely the difference between putting it up last night and this morning would have been significant."
Marissa pointed at Urs and suggested the urgency had been his. There simply hadn't been time to notify the UI team until after the Chad page had already shipped. She agreed the page should have been held until the morning and reminded me that she had worked hard to put the UI team process in place. Still, I bridled at the systemic exclusion of marketing from decisions with obvious brand impact.
In retrospect, I'm not sure that was such a bad thing.
Part of the power of Google's brand was the cluelessly geek chic it projected, as though a site serving millions of users around the globe were being run by a handful of nerds who didn't know any better than to put whatever struck their fancy on the homepage. I think I had a pretty good ear for that nerd voice and was able to channel it into the communications I crafted, but I also know that I always wanted to smooth out the rough edges and make things flow a little more nicely across the screen. It was the English major in me. Sand down too many protruding bits, though, and you end up with a perfect sphere that's not terribly interesting.
So while at the time I was quite perturbed at being usurped, the tension between Marissa and me may actually have resulted in a better brand. A brand that walked a line between overt nerdiness and polished pabulum. We were the yin and the yang: marketing and engineering, glibness and geekspeak, a gracefully arcing comma in a classic Garamond font complementing a rigidly vertical apostrophe in fixed-pitch ASCII.
Okay, so it wasn't a perfect match. There were plenty of occasions when the center did not hold; when we did something I considered tone-deaf or Marissa considered insufficiently Googley. Google was an engineering company. When we did not agree, we usually did what engineering thought best.
One upshot of the bicycle debacle (as I came to think of the Chad contretemps) was that Marissa explicitly agreed that the text on the site was my province, even as she rejected, rewrote, or edited the "final" copy I passed along to be posted. We butted heads frequently over the months and years to come. Sometimes I won and sometimes I lost, but the arguments were always elucidating. And when Marissa and