Google’s Product Development & Management Process Revealed

From Marissa Mayer via Evelyn Rodriguez. Download here>>
Thanks for taking notes, Evelyn!
Some highlights:
Small, Agile Engineering Teams
• 3-person units (like start-ups!)
• Unit is a project – they don’t have departments
• Unit is co-located (sit next to each other) also with PM
• Engineers work on project for 3-4 months, then transition to next project
• Very fluid
• With 180 engineers, they can work on 60 projects – so they can afford to invest
on high-risk, high-return projects as well. (They call high-risk projects “Googlettes”)
• Each project manager works with 9-10 people across units. For example, maybe a category such as “Enterprise Infrastructure”
• The technical lead in each unit of 3 is responsible for technical excellence of project.
• Documentation
– Very sparse, only what is needed in Product Requirements Document
(PRD)
– Eric Schmidt: “Late binding decision-making process”
– Evolves based on feedback
– Includes information on general market size, revenue in PRD but believe that “if you build something users use, there will be a way to make money”
• Large Projects
– Example: Enterprise Product – broken into logical modules, thus 4 units
(of 3 people) = 12 people
• Monetization teams
– Larry Page: “No such thing as a successful failure; if it is useful to people, later we can make revenue from it in a logical way.”
– Focus on providing value to user first.
– Then create team to execute the “monetization” of most useful products/services.
• Marissa (speaker) was on team to monetize search
– Created AdWords, etc.
This is very, very interesting. Beeg trouble for moose and squirrel, er, Microsoft!