I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, and with Apple’s scheduled iPod announcements today, here’s what Marissa had to say about Apple and Steve Jobs.

DAVID ECKOFF: I understand you admire Steve Jobs and Apple, how do you study and model Apple?

MARISSA MAYER: One of the things I do on the side of the Search Products business, is I run an associates program. I hire people right out of school with computer science degrees and teach them how to be good product mangers in the Google sense. Part of being a good product manager is being able to think and talk about and launch your products.

We do a series of field trips during the year and one of the field trips is to Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in January where he unveils a lot of the products for that half of the year.

And it’s really interesting, because it’s almost like a football coach watching the opposing team and trying to break it down into X’s and O’s. On the bus back from San Francisco, we’ll break down, how did he talk about that, what worked, what was clever about it. A lot of insights can come out of that in terms of what can help build excitement about a product, what can build understanding.

There’s a lot of interesting insights the team has had into the way he talks about products and how he makes really complicated principles easily understandable.

DAVID ECKOFF: Are there any other companies you study who you think do a great job with innovation?

MARISSA MAYER: I think 3M is a great company where it is clear they do a lot to incent new innovation and ideas. We look a lot at start ups. How people are incented. How they guarantee a fast innovation cycle.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing a new online business dedicated to aggregating the explosion of news and discussion on the web and filtering/organizing that content by niche topics of interest to passionate fans.

Photo credits: Marissa Mayer: dfarber; Steve Jobs: Danny Novo

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: If you were to go to work at a company more mature in it’s lifecycle, what would be your approach to innovation and new product development?

MARISSA MAYER: I think a couple of things transcend. I think 20% time, letting your employees know that you trust them and that they’re empowered to work on the things that they think could have the biggest impact on the business or that they think could be most impactful for the world is an important idea and I think works largely everywhere.

And there are key elements that we look at in terms of overall metrics and trends that you want to coach the organization towards. One of them is small teams.

When I joined Google, there were 9 engineers and we organized in 3 teams of 3. And we knew we were going to add 9 engineers by year end, so there’d be 18 of us. And Larry and Sergey said, “You know what? By year end, we don’t want to have 3 teams of 6, we want to have 6 teams of 3. Let’s keep the core team at the size 3. Because if we have twice as many engineers, we don’t want to be doing all the same things twice as well, we want to be doing twice as many things.”

So there’s a conscious decision to sacrifice some element of quality and polish for the sake of doing more things and having more of a breadth of efforts going on.

The other nice benefit this has is it keeps the culture much more entrepreneurial and much more motivated. Because when you’re working on a smaller team you have a much greater sense of ownership. You’re not sitting there thinking, “If I don’t do X today, someone else will pick up the slack or it can wait for tomorrow.” Because it’s important enough for one of the 4 of you to do it. Or it’s not. So I think by creating a culture that has those small teams, you’re much more likely to get innovation.

That’s true in start ups, that’s true in large companies.

And then there’s the concept of leapfrogging. We’ve noticed that as Google has matured as a company, some teams, while they may be structured in smaller teams within them, they’re large teams. Our search team is a large team. We have more people working on search now than ever. The same is true for ads.

What we’ve noticed there is when we add a small disrupter team, that’s supposed to think about things in a new and different way, two bad things happen.

One, the large, experienced, mature team wants to talk with the disrupter team, and say, “I know that seems like a good idea, because it seemed like a good idea to us too. But we tried it, and it was a waste of a year. So please, don’t bother to do that. Skip that idea and move onto the next thing. So they’re trying to influence what the disrupter team does.

The other thing that happens is usually that big team is successful, and they have a lot of tools and infrastructure that the disrupter team wants to draft off of. So as a result, in a big company with a large successful team, it’s difficult for the disrupter team not to get sucked into the larger team over time.

So what we started doing as we rolled out leapfrog initiatives, we structure them organizationally and from a communication standpoint where they’re out of touch with the core team. They’re in a different reporting structure, a different engineering VP. And also physically diverse.

We’ve had a bunch of attempts at leapfrogs, such as in search, with a team in Kirkland trying to build a better search engine than Google itself. And I’m not allowed to talk with them [laughter]. And that’s a good thing, because I know they’re wasting time. I know they’re doing things we tried that just don’t work [laughter].

I’d love to talk with them and I’d love to save them that effort. But that very action of me doing that would ultimate change their outcome and change how disruptive they can be. So it’s really important that I not talk to the Kirkland search leapfrog and let them do their thing.

And who knows, maybe they’ll build a better search engine. But we do think that with a few years under their belt that they will have different features and different ideas that maybe could stand on their own and be stronger than Google itself. Or maybe it [the features] should be folded into the main search engine after they reach a level of maturity and have proven their value. We have similar efforts in Maps and Advertising.

Again, you want to keep a small team. But you also want a disrupter to be far enough away that they don’t get overly influenced or voluntarily pulled into the larger, more successful team.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing a new online business dedicated to aggregating the explosion of news and discussion on the web and filtering/organizing that content by niche topics of interest to passionate fans.

Photo credit: eirikso

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: Could you talk about the product management process at Google, how you go from idea to product, a high level overview?

MARISSA MAYER: Every product has its own genesis. But we gather ideas from all over the company. Some of the ideas are top down, us realizing we have strategic holes in what we’re offering our end users. A lot of the ideas are bottoms up, engineers and other employees coming up with ideas and prototypes of what they’d want to build.

From there, there definitely are phases of a product.

For example, a prototype at Google is worth 100,000 words. It’s one thing to talk to someone about an idea; it’s a whole other thing to be able to show a series of mock ups and/or a functioning website that illustrates your idea.

From there we try to put a small team on it, sometimes a volunteer effort with what we call 20% time. 20% time is a notion we have at Google that we want employees to work on whatever they want to work on regardless of it is part of their core assignment with about 20% of their time. So some of the times the prototype is developed voluntarily, other time by a small team. But generally it’s a couple of individuals who develop the prototype.
And then we launch it. We try to send it out to Google Labs as quickly as we can.

We try to launch early and often and then change the product, iterate it based on user feedback, adding more resources as something gains strength and popularity.

DAVID ECKOFF: What kind of return on investment do you see with 20% time?

MARISSA MAYER: We call it 20% time, that’s our slogan that provides our employees with a creative license to know they are empowered to spend 20% of their time to do whatever it is they feel most passionately about. Because we believe it is that kind passion that creates really great and beautiful products. At the end of the day it’s about building something that you think will be particularly powerful.

What we’ve found is that often supports the core and gives us a disproportionate return on investment.

Someone once asked me to quantify the outputs of 20% time, and I looked over our launch calendar which had all our historic launches for a 6 month period, tagging where the different ideas came from. And we realized over that 6 month period, over 50% of the products and features that had launched, came from 20% time. So it was disproportionate by a factor of about two and a half. So for us, it is very worthwhile.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing a new online business dedicated to aggregating the explosion of news and discussion on the web and filtering/organizing that content by niche topics of interest to passionate fans.

Photo credit: jwowens

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview with Marissa Mayer of Google last year, filmed before a live studio audience. Marissa leads Google’s product management efforts on search products. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’ll be publishing more excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: What cultural attributes makes Google special when it comes to innovating and developing new products?

MARISSA MAYER: People like to question the status quo and they like to think about doing things in new audacious ways. If the standard in the industry is to give away 4-6MB of mail space, let’s not make it 20 MB of space, let’s give them a gig.

Try to have big and audacious goals for how to do something and how to approach new problems. Larry and Sergey will talk about, as we start off new ideas within the company, we really want a new idea to have a billion dollar revenue run rate opportunity. That doesn’t mean we think about monetization all the time, what we really think about are the end users and what they ultimately want. But we want them to be big opportunities, things that really matter to people that they will use every day. Because when you work on really big important problems that matter and that are fundamentally useful to people’s everyday lives, you’ll find a way to monetize them. Either it will be so valuable that users will pay for a subscription and/or there will be a way to have advertising.

DAVID ECKOFF: Google has seen tremendous growth in the number of employees. How do you maintain the culture of the company?

MARISSA MAYER: I started when there were 18 people and now there are about 18,000 people. I think we were very lucky when we were small, the people we hired were all likeminded they were all interested in working on products that mattered they all wanted to do good things for the world and work on problems and projects that their friends and family would use every day. As a result, we had a very stable culture then.

As new hires come, you make small talk with new employees. I’d ask “What drew you to Google?” At around 1200 employees, I heard this interesting answer I’d never gotten before: “the culture.” I thought, that’s such an odd reason to go to a company. For me graduating from school and deciding to go to Google, it was about working on really interesting problems involving artificial intelligence and how it gets applied to search. It was the intellectual challenge that drew me to Google. So going for the culture seemed like an odd answer. But then I started hearing that answer all the time. And I noticed as we went from about 1200 employees to 1500 employees, almost 50% of the new people I talked with started citing the culture.

And I realized that the culture was having a very interesting reinforcing effect. There’s the point of maintaining stability up to 1200 employees. But once we hit 1200 employees, the culture became very self reinforcing. Because when you have a majority of employees joining a company for the culture, the last thing those employees want to do when they arrive is change it or screw it up. They came there to experience it, to participate in it, to benefit from it. And as a result, the culture has become very stable.

I think that what one of the most stunning things is how similarly motivated the early Googlers are to today’s Googlers. The conversations that happen every night around the foosball table or in the snack kitchens, you hear the same kind of aspirational language: what could Google do, what would be possible, what’s interesting in technology and how could we combine that with the infrastructure we’re building? What would be a big and audacious goal in this area? Those same conversations happen every night. The people who come now are inspired by the same principles that we had early on.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing a new online business dedicated to aggregating the explosion of news and discussion on the web and filtering/organizing that content by niche topics of interest to passionate fans.

Photo credit: Esthr

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