How Google Works, written by ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg, lays down the principles on which Google is built. Summary and thoughts:
“Product excellence is tantamount to business success.” Platforms like Yelp, Amazon, and Steam give consumers “a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril.” Since consumers have so many options, and information about those options, product quality is critical. Jeff Bezos, founder/CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
“The second reason product excellence is so critical is that the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly. You see this most dramatically in high-tech industries, where a small team can create fabulous products and distribute them online globally for free.” “Product development has become a faster, more flexible process… The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.”
“Attract smart creatives and create an environment where they can succeed at scale.” A “smart creative” differs from a traditional knowledge worker in that they aren’t “confined to specific tasks. They are not averse to taking risks, nor are they punished when those risky initiatives fail. They are encouraged to exercise their own ideas.”
The second part, speed, comes from flatter organizations. Hierarchy is designed to slow things down, with decisions made by top-level managers flowing down to the workers. “Smart creatives prefer a flat organization, less because they want to be closer to the top and more because they want to get things done and need direct access to decision-makers.” Google’s rule of seven inverts the normal maximum of seven direct reports per manager, to “a minimum of seven. This means less managerial oversight and more employee freedom.”
Valve employs this flat-archy to the extreme. Whereas Google still has hierarchy, albeit less of it, Valve is actually flat. Projects are given the greenlight not by a decision-maker, but rather by how many people are in a room working on it. If lots of people think a project is worth their time, it’ll gain more momentum and importance. In this talk, Gabe Newell explains Valve’s philosophy of increasing range of action when designing a solution. SteamOS is built on Linux because they’re free from restrictions from Microsoft or Apple, and Steam as a platform empowers developers to ship software anywhere. They’re moving into hardware because you can make better shit when you’re doing both the hardware and software. Valve’s “smart creative” can both code and draw/animate/art, and is able to come at a problem from either side. It’s made me reconsider my hesitance to learn design/art. My previous mindset was more like “I’ll just get really good at coding and let other people do the other stuff”, which now seems a bit foolish.
“When starting a new company, culture is the most important thing to consider. To be effective, smart creatives need to care about the place they work. Document culture before you start hiring, because it doesn’t change easily. Make sure your principles are actionable. Google’s “Focus on the User” and “Don’t be Evil” are good examples, and Sergey and Larry’s 2004 IPO letter has more of Google’s values.
“The best cultures are aspirational…there will be failures, but there will be more cases where people overdeliver, and when that happens the bar gets set even higher. That is the power of a great culture: It can make each member of the company better. And it can make the company ascendant.”
“Bet on technical insights.” A technical insight is “a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.” Ask yourself, “What is the technical insight behind this product/feature/platform?” Some recent examples of products driven by technical insights are Apple’s microvibration trackpad and Valve’s Lighthouse.
Substitute “functions and usability” with “fun”, and focus on the design part, and this applies to video games. Chasing realism with better physics simulations and graphics produces incredible results, but games are more than tech demos. But designing dynamic AI or cleverly generating levels can manufacture endless fun.
One noteworthy example is in Left 4 Dead 2 co-op, where a global Director AI makes note of the players’ path through the level, their pace, and their proximity to each other, to spawn enemies behind or around the player group. The Director’s goal is to produce a cinematic experience of tense silence punctuated by intense skirmishes, culminating in a chaotic climax.
This principle boils down to “design your game to be fun” - well duh. But the easier it is to point to a particular aspect of your game and say “that’s cooool”, the more fun it will be.
“Creativity loves constraints.” I enjoy the pithiness of this. It’s inspiring, and makes me wanna do a hackathon right now, immediately. Google gives their most speculative and risky projects the smallest budgets, to breed ingenuity.
“Ask the hardest questions.” “When information is truly ubiquitous, when reach and connectivity are completely global, when computing resources are infinite, and when a whole new set of impossibilities are not only possible, but happening, what will that do to your business?”
“What’s after mobile phones?” VR is a pretty good bet. Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) will give us brain-to-brain communication, and Gabe Newell’s aiming to provide the VR platform for a future where “each of our brains has a MAC address”.
So it’s definitely worth a read; I didn’t cover what they said about hiring, leading companies full of smart people, and building culture. It’s got some good stories, and some terrible humor.