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"Googlers had passionate beliefs," remembered Matt Cutts, whose first pass at a porn filter was publicly picked apart on the engineering list. "So two entirely polite, consensus-driven people—you would have to send them on a walk around the block and have them work it out, because they both believed so strongly."

Matt believed the head-butting over issues outsiders wouldn't care about—if they even noticed them—wasn't about turf or politics. It was about determining what was best for users. The question, then, was who best represented the voice of those users within Google.

I thought I did.

I read users' email to us. I wrote the words that spoke to them from our site. I had spent decades in direct contact with customers of all kinds who didn't understand how to use any device with more than two knobs and a button. In UI team meetings and product reviews, it was easy for me to see which changes could cause confusion, because those changes confused me. I might not have been a digital everyman, but I was better cast in that role than my colleagues who could name a half dozen open-source operating systems and considered them all superior to Windows.

Marissa Mayer also strove to channel the concerns of users, referencing her mom in the Midwest as someone to keep in mind when introducing features or rearranging the interface. It was natural that Marissa's role as the interim UI engineer would lead her to safeguard user interests, and she did so with intensity. Her enthusiasm and intelligence carried her opinions as a kind of rolling assault. If you weren't initially overwhelmed, she launched wave after wave of data, ideas, and arguments like landing craft at Normandy.

In a data-driven company, numbers are a big stick to wield, and Marissa cited stats that convinced her she was empirically correct. But while I had seen the power of quantitative analysis to persuade, I had never fully climbed aboard the data train. As a result, we didn't always agree.

If I lacked the numerological faith of my colleagues, I did share some of their characteristics: a focus that detected subatomic flaws, an inability to ignore inconvenient truths, and an obdurate unwillingness to cede my position until completely overrun. I stood up for what I believed, even when my only support was the gates of Hell pushing into my back.

I come from a stiff-necked people.

I often yielded on issues of design—or at least funneled my views through Karen, who had complete credibility as an impartial webmaster—but my disagreements with Marissa about wording and tone grew deeper after the MentalPlex April Fools' contretemps.

Many Googlers believed they spoke the tongue of the "average user" with native fluency, not realizing how thick a geek accent they brought to conversations about privacy or customer communications. What would users like? What would they find intrusive? Offensive? Why would anyone be upset by that? We all quoted the gospel of efficiency and swore to put our users first.

Whatever the nature of our opposing views, our culture urged quick resolution. Googlers wanted to get things done. Sanjay described engineers' approach to disputes this way: "We said, we can keep on discussing this for a long time and try to get agreement or we can just go ahead and do at least the part we know."

Complete buy-in wasn't a requirement. If there were holdouts, Urs would call a meeting and announce, "Okay, fine, we've argued for a week. There are no new insights being produced. Let's do the pros and cons and make a decision and move on. Because it's time to move on."

Larry was the only one who could play that role when it came to interdepartmental divergences, and given Cindy's directive not to delay product launches for marketing reasons, there was some risk in defending a branding perspective past a certain point. I had trouble seeing that point. When my lack of a self-preservation instinct became apparent, others sought my help in elevating issues to upper management. Would I forward concerns about our poor translation quality?