I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [30]
Once Larry and Sergey heard that we intended to dictate product plans to engineering, they threw a monkey wrench at us. That wrench was Salar. He didn't kill our committee directly, but it died just the same. Salar said that Larry was fine with answering a list of questions to clarify our corporate strategy, but that product development would remain ad hoc until further notice.
Something must have gotten through, though, because the next day Sergey issued a company-wide manifesto of sorts, listing our top three priorities: "product excellence, user acquisition, and revenue." It wasn't much of an action plan. Nor did it answer broader questions like "How will we ensure user loyalty?" and "What is our market-expansion strategy?"
I stopped asking those questions eventually, as I became convinced our founders intended to pick a path to the future based on gut instinct, then haul ass through a fire swamp of competition with the entire company riding on their backs. Such a strategy required them to hold a degree of certainty in their own abilities.
"They had so much self-confidence that Sergey was convinced he personally could find a cure for AIDS," engineer Chad Lester marveled. And why not? With twenty-five million dollars in the bank, the founders' wild hubris was free to roam the plains. Life gives you few chances to make decisions as if no one else's opinion matters. Google offered just such an opportunity. Venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital sat on Google's board,* but the board didn't have control—that belonged to Larry and Sergey. All the board could do was try to guide them.
Larry and Sergey had anointed Cindy VP of corporate marketing and put her in charge of public relations and promotion, but not the development of products. The board wanted a different leader to build that organization—someone with technical savvy, but not an engineer. When engineers drive the gravy train, sometimes they focus on how fast they can go rather than where they're headed.
Larry and Sergey reluctantly agreed to take a look around, though no traditional consumer-marketing person could possibly impress them. The right candidate would have to be able to communicate with coders, execute quickly, and be very, very smart. And smell nice. Sergey once rejected an applicant in part because "I thought he had kind of a bad body odor."
Jonathan Rosenberg, an executive at Excite@Home, was very, very smart, and the board strongly hinted that he would be the best fit for Google's needs. Jonathan had other ideas and decided to stay at Excite for two more years before claiming the role of Google's vice president of product management. He left behind more than a résumé, though. He convinced Larry and Sergey that there might be a role for a product-management group if, and only if, it didn't usurp the divinely ordained primacy of engineering. God forbid that Google become a marketing-driven company. In marketing-driven companies, researchers identified customer needs and then product managers (PMs)* directed engineers to create products to fill those gaps. I had been taught that was a good thing to do.
"Let's do a gap analysis," I used to say at the Merc. "What's the unmet need? Where's the market opportunity? How much share can we gain?" Engineers hate that kind of thinking.
If you're an engineer with a brilliant idea, seeing it dumbed down or abandoned because it doesn't test well is like watching a bully pull the wings off a butterfly. The right thing to do is build it regardless, to prove that you can and because building cool things is—well, you end up with cool things.
Pure-hearted geeks flee the hellish realm of product-driven companies, where soul-sucking suits shuffle after profits instead of perfection and the boss doesn't understand any technology more complicated than a binder clip. There, product