I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [170]
"Whoa," I responded, then let Jonathan know he had misinterpreted the intent of the email and that he was the only one sensing a conflict. I offered to take it offline with him if he thought clarifying responsibilities delayed execution rather than accelerating it. He backed down and came as close to an apology as he could without actually saying he was sorry. He privately explained his frustration about having a new team that had yet to mesh and seemed to be taking longer than necessary to get things done.
After that incident, we reached an understanding. Jonathan could be loud, insistent, and overbearing at times with his own staff, who seemed wary of his mercurial mood shifts. With me, though, he adopted a paternal air (despite my being three years older) and offered some level of respect—perhaps because I had not hesitated to return his fire.
So when Jonathan established a "chain gang" comprising new members of his team, he offered to have them work on low-level tasks in my department, such as checking that our partners were using our logo properly on their sites. Likewise, I offered his PMs my first-born son, Adam. At age fourteen, he needed something to get him out of the house over summer break. Jonathan threw some assignments Adam's way and, though he was too young to be paid, gifted him with a new iPod when the work was done.
I appreciated Jonathan's generosity and took his eccentricities in stride. "Look, I'm on a scooter!" he once shouted as he rode past Sergey and a reporter interviewing him. Later he told me he wanted the reporter to write about the wacky ways of Googlers—not one of the key messages in Cindy's PR plan.
"Look! I'm a human pop-up ad!" he exclaimed on another occasion, walking in front of me as I presented to a group of Wharton MBA candidates.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our VP of product management," I murmured as he strode on down the hall followed by their incredulous stares.
And I definitely picked up on tension between Cindy and Jonathan over his ambition to do greater things at Google. The first logical way to expand his empire would be to annex Cindy's small corporate marketing group. She made it clear that issues in his own backyard needed addressing before he made any moves toward her domain. "I was hoping you would tell us the next step," she pointedly responded when he offered to help resolve an issue about pricing for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). "Maybe a conversation with your PM? Or some decisive action?" At other times her tone was even terser, as when she insisted that she needed to interview any candidate for a job with "marketing" in the title. The tension ebbed and flowed with shifts in the overall barometric pressure within the Plex. One day Cindy and Jonathan were rivals, the next, the closest of colleagues.
My own issues with Jonathan's group settled into a low simmer and I hoped to keep them there. I admonished my group not to wallow in an us-versus-them mentality regarding the PM group. I admitted my own sins in demonizing Jonathan's team and suggested we focus on getting things done, not on the obstacles that might stand in our way. I said that if my direct reports came to me with a complaint about a colleague's demands or behavior, I would first ask if they had addressed the issue with the person involved and what thoughts they had about solutions.
Those rules didn't apply in product management, however. When Marissa felt too much marketing attention was being paid to the GSA at the expense of her Google.com initiatives, she came straight to Cindy. In particular, she felt we weren't sufficiently supportive of Krishna Bharat's soon-to-be-launched Google news service, a product in which she had developed a special interest. At the same time, the GSA team hammered us daily for more ways to generate sales leads, despite the relatively small revenue the Search Appliance represented.