I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [31]
Larry and Sergey would not allow that at Google. Their company would appreciate the inherent beauty of inspired design in breakthrough technologies like a spell checker that recognized a hundred variations of the name "Britney Spears" or a calculator that could convert the speed of light into furlongs per fortnight. For that to happen, a Google PM would need to be someone smart enough to understand engineers but not intimidate or subordinate them. Someone the founders would feel comfortable having as a direct report. Someone who would stand up to them when need be, but who wouldn't waste their time with trivial concerns.
"I was the first person who wasn't an engineer working with engineering to define the product," Salar recalls. "We decided to call that product management."
Salar's transformation into a one-person department complemented the other process piece that fell into place in January 2000.
"The Internet is under-hyped," John Doerr had declared early in the dot-com boom. Silicon Valley listened, because Doerr's early investments through Kleiner Perkins in winners like Sun, Netscape, Compaq, and Amazon proved his uncanny acumen. Now, as one of our board members, he prescribed the best practices from his portfolio companies to beef up Google's anemic process management and tighten our flabby decision-making.
"We had a marvelous meeting this morning with John Doerr," Cindy said one day. "I was terrifically impressed with the thinking he's trying to instill in our guys."
Doerr's corporate growth regimen comprised a system for setting goals and measuring progress that he called Objectives and Key Results or OKRs. It was far more methodical than the ad hoc list of nebulous goals Sergey had unleashed on us just a week before.
"Objectives," Doerr instructed Larry and Sergey, "should be significant and communicate action. They state what you want to accomplish, while key results detail how you will accomplish those goals." Key results, therefore, should be aggressive, measurable, and time-specific. Doerr warned the founders not to overdo it: five objectives with four key results each should be sufficient.
Larry and Sergey's initial objectives included "move toward market leadership," "best search user experience," "meet or exceed revenue plan," and "improve internal organization." Those broad categories remained for many quarters, but the key results—the steps we would take to achieve them—kept changing, from "distribution deals adding half a million searches per day" to the "launch of Google in ten languages" and "CEO candidate selected."
If I wanted to see webmaster Karen White's priorities, or Cindy's or Larry's, I had only to call up the company phone list on our intranet (nicknamed "MOMA" by Craig Silverstein after the Museum of Modern Art) and click their names. It helped, because in the final days of the quarter everyone rushed to check things off their lists. If someone else's OKRs were contingent on me, I wanted to be forewarned they'd be hunting me down, and I wanted to know that the people whose help I would need to complete my own OKRs were aware of them.
In a company filled with overachievers, I assumed everyone would accomplish all their OKRs. No. It turned out that that would indicate failure. The ideal success rate was seventy percent, which showed we were stretching ourselves. Larry and Sergey assured us that missing OKRs wouldn't factor into performance reviews, because if they did we would take too few risks.
OKRs forced us to reevaluate priorities at least four times a year. If our industry changed or our corporate goals did, we had an obligation to bring out our near-dead initiatives and load them in the tumbrel. At the Merc, it had been nearly impossible to stop projects once they started. I had sat on a committee that decided our neighborhood news sections bled