• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

When the day of reckoning arrived, we came prepared with Super Soakers, a blender churning out margaritas, and a boom box belting out carwash tunes. Jonathan was soon sopping wet and making little progress on the task at hand. He looked mortally betrayed when members of his own team joined in the assault against him. Cindy, sensing things were getting out of hand, stepped in and grabbed a sponge, putting an end to the deluge.

We had wanted to see Jonathan share our pain. Our lives had changed with his structured approach to product management. In July 2002, he reorganized his division and introduced the roles of APM (associate product manager) and PMM (product marketing manager) and promptly went on a hiring binge.* There were suddenly many more flavors of PMs, and they all needed more from me and my marketing colleagues. It was convenient to blame Jonathan for the hailstorm of their demands and for their apparent belief that we had no projects on our plates other than theirs.

It was all part of a shift that Eric Schmidt had outlined at our first mid-quarter ops review back in May, a meeting held at a restaurant adjacent to the municipal golf course just down the road. Lunch was lasagna. Forty of us—mid-level managers and execs—had gathered in a low-tech conference room that was sunny and hot. We kept the door open, despite the threat of ducks wandering in off the putting green and the irritating "beep—beep—beep" of golf carts backing up just outside. Sergey sat at the front wearing a spandex biking shirt and shorts. Every few minutes he would launch a tiny remote-controlled flying saucer/hovercraft and send it careering around the room or try to make it hover over Larry's head. Susan coordinated the meeting, keeping time on presentations to ensure we stayed on schedule.* Eric kicked off the meeting by laying out the "Google Great Company Five," the areas we needed to get right in order to become a great company: global sales, strong brand and ethics, great financials, a good hiring process, and innovation.

No major initiatives resulted directly from the get-together, but it marked, as Eric called it, "a phase change in our evolution." We were consciously leaving behind our startup days and becoming a big company that made plans, communicated them to key managers, and then reviewed them on a scheduled basis. Eric established a mailing list called "VIPs" for directors and vice-presidents to keep us informed and to solicit input. And he offered a few directives of his own.

"Get a checkup," he instructed David Drummond. It had been a while since David had been to a doctor, and Eric wanted to be sure everyone was in good health for the challenges ahead.

"Buy a house with broadband," he lectured Bart Woytowicz, who complained about his slow Internet access at home. "Every one of you needs DSL or cable access."

"Develop better metrics for everything—from hiring women engineers to advertiser conversion rates," he reminded all of us. "And look for things we can patent."

I came away from the ops review determined to button down our marketing efforts and make them more systematic. My focus would be on supporting our revenue initiatives. And growing our international presence. And distilling our brand message. I had already put a fair amount of work into all three, but had really nailed the last one. The day before the offsite, I had sent our executives a list of five thematic messages for all Google communications—a distillation of a discussion I had been leading in our Baby Beagle group over the previous six months. We had started off looking for an alternative to "portal" to describe our business and ended up looking more deeply into our core identity as an institution.

"Google drives better decisions," I wrote. "Google technology makes things more accurate, while making them easier to use. Google is ubiquitous. Google creates information marketplaces. Google is a clear channel for information." I offered brief explanations and showed how