Google Innovation Culture

Une culture de l’innovation 2 Patrick Chanezon [email_address] http://twitter.com/ chanezon HEC Montreal 20 Octobre 2009

Traits of Google Enterprise Culture
Infrastructure Culture
Universality
Design Principles
Inspiration driven by data
Risk
Agile
Open Source
APIs
Googleyness
The world is flat
Do no evil
Getting the right People
Strategic patience

Infrastructure culture

Infrastructure culture
Larry and Serguey’s 1998 paper ”The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Other Google Research papers since then
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
Build on the shoulders of giants
Custom stack made of standards parts: machines, linux, servers
Standard infrastructure: sharding, GFS, MapReduce, BigTable
Google App Engine: easy cloud, for Googlers and others developers
Standard languages: c/c++, java, python
Horizontal scalability: parallel and asynchronous whenever possible

Universality

Universality
Be ambitious
Tackle large problems…
…at the scale of the web
Examples: gmail, GWT, OpenSocial, Maps, Earth, Checkout, App Engine, Chrome, Wave
Products or parts of them can become reusable infrastructure
GWT used in Wave and AdWords
Checkout used in Android Market
BigTable used in App Engine

What makes a design "Googley"?

What makes a design "Googley"?
1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-googley.html

Inspiration driven by Data

Inspiration driven by Data
A/B testing (see Marissa's preso) for UI
Everything is measured
Measures drive product development
Dogfood program: use products internally before they are released, sometimes friend and family programs
Gmail labs: allows 20% ideas to be pushed out to external volunteers

Fail often, fail quickly, and learn

Fail often, fail quickly, and learn
Risk taking/Experimentation is encouraged
http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=96
“Do not be afraid of day-to-day failures — learn from them. (As they say at Google, “don’t run from failure — fail often, fail quickly, and learn.”) Cherish your history, both the successes and mistakes. All of these behaviors are the way to get better at programming. If you don’t follow them, you’re cheating your own personal development.”
Ben Collins-Sussman (Subversion, code.google.com)

Agile Development Processes

Agile Development Processes
Influences from XP, Agile, Scrum
Code reviews
Test Driven Development: Testing on the Toilets program and blog
Many internal development tools: Mondrian recently open sourced
Changed the meaning of beta
Teams co-located: 3-15 people, 4/cubicle, all close to each other
International offices: manage whole projects, avoid coordination costs

Open Source Culture

Open Source Culture
Open Source Program Office
Summer of Code
Open sourcing parts of Google code
http://code.google.com/
Making the web better: GWT, Gears, OpenSocial, Android

API Culture

API Culture
Bill Joy: "Innovation happens elsewhere"
From 3 to 62 APIs in 3 years
Maps on websites
Friend Connect: all sites can become social
http://code.google.com/ for the list
Build an ecosystem around the APIs (my job)
User's choice: get their data out

API Culture (fr-ca)

Googleyness

Googleyness
Innovation
Non conformism
Risk taking
Flexibility
Pragmatism: doers, coders, not talkers, architects or “urbanists”

The world is flat

The world is flat
Flat management structure but structured processes
7 levels for 20k employees
Tolerance for chaos
Managed bottom up process for innovation:
20% time
Committee to decide whether to invest in a project
70/20/10 rule
Culture of consensus

Do No Evil

Do No Evil
Not an absolute
More like a moral compass for the company
Frequently used in meetings: wildcard that can change decisions

Getting the right people

Getting the right people
Layered recruitment process: phone screens, interviews, committees, Larry & Serguey's final word
50% engineers, 50% sales
High bar for engineers
Free food, best perks in the industry
Google transportation: shuttle, bikes, experiments
Acquisitions: small teams, early stage, for people and technology

Strategic patience

Strategic patience
AdWords provides a regular and solid revenue stream
Allows Google to be patient when investing other areas
70/20/10 Rule
Examples: Gmail, Google Apps, Checkout
Acquisitions: teams lost for a year to migrate to Google infrastructure
... but it pays off!

Harvard Business Review article
“Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine”, HBR april 2008, Bala Iyer and Thomas Davenport
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0804C
They got it right
Indentified many aspects of what makes Google culture work well for innovation
And provide a process to help you adapt some of its elements to your business

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Google Innovation Culture

by Patrick Chanezon

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