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Product review was the meeting at which I learned about major initiatives while they were still the equivalent of a tropical depression forming somewhere in the Atlantic. At that stage, redirecting branding efforts might have some effect. Under the new system, I would not have input into products until they were full-fledged hurricanes five miles off the coast. I'd be able to do little other than board up the windows, huddle for cover, and pray for the best.

I thanked Marissa for trying to save me from an unnecessary meeting, but assured her I preferred to know what was happening with product development. Cindy reminded Marissa that since our product was our marketing platform, marketing needed to be part of the discussion that happened in the product-review meetings. The debate went on for a month, but the die was cast, and marketing was cast out.

Marissa told me that it was actually Larry and Jonathan who had suggested constraining the meeting to those in the product group. That may have been true, but since the word always came through Marissa, it was hard to know if something was lost in translation. I knew Larry hated large crowds, and now that the product group worked with engineering, perhaps he felt brand management's presence was redundant. Whoever instigated the change, it made my job harder. And it did not improve my working relationship with Marissa, who was promoted to director of consumer web products in mid-July 2003. I congratulated her and asked to set up a regular touch-base meeting so we could coordinate our efforts. It never happened.

Instead, our communication channel kept degrading. One day I heard from someone in product management that Sergey was furious at marketing. He believed we were holding up the launch of a new Google toolbar until it included a way for users to clear their search history. One of the most common questions we received from users was about removing previous search queries from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The question came up because when people started to type in a Google search, their previous search terms would appear below it on the screen. Users didn't want that information displayed. Even though Microsoft was responsible for storing that data, our toolbar engineers thought they could fix it so the previous searches didn't appear.

I thought that would be great, but neither I nor anyone else in corporate marketing ever asked for it to be included. The toolbar engineers liked the idea enough to work over the weekend coding it anyway. Someone informed Sergey that our group was not only holding up the launch for the history-clearing add-on but insisting that the new feature delete Google's cookie as well.

"Why the hell are you letting marketing drive your product development?" Sergey demanded of the associate product manager, who spent a half hour well after midnight trying to calm him down and explain what was actually going on.

"There were only three people at Google at that hour," the APM vented, "Larry and Sergey and you-know-who. She found out about it and then all hell broke loose."

The UI team also struggled to retain access to the product-development process but we found ourselves marginalized, especially on design issues around Google news, which had become an entity unto itself under Marissa's stewardship. One of Marissa's APMs sent out a drastically different design for news search results and requested UI feedback forty-eight hours before the "code freeze," after which programmers would implement the design. Such major changes would normally be reviewed and tested for weeks, but Marissa informed us that Larry felt the project was behind schedule and so had asked her to form a task force to move it ahead.

The last straw for me was not about a major change, but about how a minor change was handled. Google's fifth anniversary as a company occurred in September 2003. Marissa reworked the wording of the alt-text of our Google birthday logo, the phrase that appeared when you rolled your mouse over the artwork