I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [32]
I had mixed feelings about the efficacy of OKRs as a gauge of progress and individual accomplishment. I could support product launches on my own, because that just entailed writing copy for the website or drafting promotion plans, but I struggled to complete projects requiring engineering resources, like revamping our online store, or refitting a van as a portable wireless-access point (a Larry idea), or launching an affiliate program to pay webmasters to send traffic to our site (also a Larry idea).
As I sat in Cindy's mid-quarter update meetings, I studied my colleagues' reports and the traffic-light-colored circles next to each of their OKRs. Green meant completed or soon to be. Red meant major obstacles or a dead end. PRs' slides always looked like a well-watered fairway. My tech-dependent goals resembled a jaundice victim working on a sunburn. Yet the end result did feel like progress. After the OKRs had been in place a while, I emailed a friend I'd left behind at the Merc: "We're suddenly a much more focused company, which makes me think we could actually be on to something here."
Together, U and I Make a Team
"There are contentious issues," I emailed another friend, "but there's no animosity built up around them. Nobody blind-copies anyone and there's not a culture of blame fixation. Corporate politics will undoubtedly come with scale, but for now, folks are too focused on getting things done to cast aspersions."
Egos, yes, we had those in abundance, but we lacked Napoleons building personal empires. Skirmishes sprang from convictions, not power lust, and I saw nothing like the bloody trench warfare I had witnessed at other companies, where heads on pikes decorated fortified domains. Engineering was engineering. Marketing was marketing. It was clear on which side of that line you stood. Unfortunately, my prescience about politics developing with scale didn't take into account the rate of Google's growth. Instead of the years I envisioned, it was just a matter of weeks before the first border guards and checkpoints appeared.
Cindy took the occasion of the new millennium to formalize areas of responsibility within our department, dividing marketing into two groups—one under Shari's direction and one under mine. But it was Salar who erected the first fences along interdepartmental lines.
My effort to instill organizational clarity had been smothered in its cradle, but Salar recognized that uncoordinated decision-making could lead to dissonance, especially with user interface (UI) issues. So he split the baby. Marissa Mayer, who was filling in part-time as a human-computer interactions (HCI) engineer, would develop proposals for the look and feel of the results pages, while Karen and I would oversee content and design of all the other pages on Google.com. Marissa and I could both present homepage modifications, and Larry would make final design decisions on the basis of testing data and his own Larry worldview. The allocation made sense in theory, but as the Catholic Church discovered in 1378, two popes don't make you twice as infallible.
A few days later, Marissa set up a "UI-team" email list for the group that would manicure Google's appearance and shape debate on usability issues. On the list were Karen, Marissa and me, Salar, Shari, and engineers Bay Chang, Krishna Bharat, and Jen McGrath. We would meet weekly to hash out the text describing new services or the color of visited links or the size of the font for the link to our help page. That way Larry could maintain a thirty-thousand-foot view and not get lost in a sandstorm of granular detail.
UI team meetings dragged on for days—or seemed to—in the sterile, airless conference room in which we met. The lights would go down, the projector would go on, and the drone of voices and page design variations would commence. Of course I had opinions about