I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [56]
Sergey tacitly agreed that the problem was not on our end. German results were quite funny. Besides, far more user feedback about MentalPlex was positive than negative.
At two a.m. I crawled into bed. I dreamed a monochrome dream about Germans and Lisbon and a police captain who looked at me quizzically and asked, "Shut it down? But everyone is having such a good time!"
The next morning I felt emotionally hung over. I had launched a joke that worked. MentalPlex perfectly fit Google's unconventional and just-a-bit geeky style. Sergey had been right all along—it was okay to play with our brand. But the mistake of translating the results interface embarrassed me. I worried that it didn't embarrass any of my colleagues.
Why had it required so much effort to make a change once complaints started coming in? Why had the decision been made to switch to Portuguese? Who had made that decision anyway? What was my role as brand manager, if not to manage the brand? I now understood where true power resided at Google. It lived in the keyboards of those authorized to push a new GWS, to actually check in the code that drove the site. Those engineers were the ultimate gatekeepers. Even when I had a green light to move a project down the tracks, someone with a different idea and a hand on the switch could change our course in the middle of the night—leaving me to awaken a hundred miles away from where I'd thought I'd be when I went to bed. MentalPlex had almost derailed us.
As soon as I got to work on Monday, I wrote up a postmortem memo to keep it from happening again. I included all the data I could glean from the six hundred email responses we had received. Seventy percent liked MentalPlex. Most of the rest complained about the translation of the interface into another language. My note codified the lesson that we should never, ever intentionally make it harder for people to search. I drafted a letter of apology to users who had complained and offered to send them free Google t-shirts. The nightmare was over. We had taken our lumps and learned from our mistake, and now we could roll on.
Not necessarily so, Marissa argued.
"The problem is not that we translated the interface into German," she said, "but that we called attention to the change by including a 'tip' about MentalPlex detecting German thoughts." In her view, if we had just put a disclaimer on the page that it was a joke, no one would have been upset.
"Most people would likely not have even noticed the translation without the tip," another engineer agreed. "Only the navigational text on the page was rendered in German—the web results themselves were still in English."
How could users not notice, I wondered, that all the text except the actual results was no longer in English? And adding a line at the bottom explaining it was all in jest would not only have failed to solve that problem, it would have been an admission that the joke was too weak to sustain itself. Jonathan Swift rarely used asterisks to explain he was being satiric.
Marissa and I never saw eye-to-eye on MentalPlex. She questioned my categorization of the user feedback even when I sent the original emails to her. I had cut-and-dried, irrefutable, objective facts at my disposal, yet we fundamentally disagreed on how to interpret the data. I wasn't interested in placing blame, but I did want to make sure we learned from our mistake and didn't repeat it. To do that, we had to reach consensus on what the mistake had been.
Omid Kordestani, the head of our sales and business development group, offered his opinion. "Really amateurish!" he complained. He meant MentalPlex from start to finish. Omid hadn't seen MentalPlex coming, and when it smacked him in the face on April 1, he was furious. Calm, smiling, even-keeled Omid derided our joke as likely to alienate the very advertisers his team had been working so