I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [171]
I could not deny, though, that Jonathan was putting in place a strong and disciplined structure for product management. He understood the data-driven decision-making mindset of our corporate leaders and gave us sound guidance on how to move projects past them. "Board members don't want lists of possible ideas," he pointed out as we prepared a presentation about getting more users to download the Google toolbar. "They just want to know exactly what we're going to do and when we're going to do it." Time and again he sent slides back for more data, until they were dense with numbers and graphs and pointed to inescapable conclusions.
I learned things by listening to him. But that didn't stop me from bringing my bazooka-sized water gun from home and unloading on him as he washed Cindy's car.
The influx of PMs, APMs, and PMMs filling out Jonathan's org chart reinforced Google's meritocratic culture. Most were young. All had impressive credentials. Jonathan made sure everyone knew how high he had set the bar by distributing the résumés of those who had not made the cut. He wanted his staff to feel elite and Eric to rest assured there would be no bozo invasion on his watch. All these brilliant tyros caught on campuses and released in our cube farm impressed and unsettled me. Jonathan was right, I concluded. The quality of employees, at least on paper, was improving. I knew my questionable GPA and lonely BA would not make the cut if I had to meet Google's revised hiring standards.
I remember attending a product-review meeting in Larry and Sergey's office with Nikhil Bhatla, an APM so fresh out of Stanford that the ink on his sheepskin was still wet. When the meeting broke up, I stayed to harass Sergey about a marketing question he had been avoiding. Time like this was precious, because it was the only way to force decisions on issues not key to keeping the site up and running.
As the group filed out, I started making my case to Sergey, expecting to have five minutes mano-a-mano in which to persuade him. I was surprised when he looked over my shoulder at Nikhil, whose curiosity had caused him to linger. "What do you think of this idea?" Sergey asked him, then listened carefully as Nikhil laid out a cogent, well-argued response that poked enough holes in my idea to fill the Albert Hall.
I confess, I wasn't happy that this ... this whippersnapper with no experience at Google was sitting in judgment of my proposal. Didn't he realize he was a junior staff member and shouldn't be within earshot to begin with? This would never have happened at the good ol' Merc, where proprieties of rank were carefully observed and it would have been unseemly, impolitic, and career-threatening to blatantly refute a manager in front of the company's top executive.
After walking briskly around the Plex a few times to cool off, I came to realize that Nikhil had made valid points. I also realized that I shouldn't have been surprised. It didn't matter that he'd only been on the job a short while. He was a smart guy. He didn't require immersion in Google's milieu to construct a logical argument when asked to do so.
That I took this lesson to heart can be seen in my own response, a year later, to an executive from another large technology firm with whom I was negotiating. I wanted his company's software for creating web pages to include an easy way to incorporate a Google search box. I had brought Priti Chinai, a recent hire from our business-development team, into the discussion. The outside exec let me know privately that, no offense, but Priti was too junior for him to waste time with. He only dealt with decision-making VPs.
"No offense taken, I said, "but you need to understand how Google works. We don't have senior VPs. We have Larry and Sergey and everybody else. The VPs we do