Google Innovation Culture

transcript

Une culture de l’innovation

Patrick Chanezonchanezon@google.comhttp://twitter.com/chanezon

HEC Montreal20 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

• 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

• 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"?

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

• 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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

• Innovation

• Non conformism

• Risk taking

• Flexibility

• Pragmatism: doers, coders, not talkers, architects or “urbanists”

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

• Not an absolute

• More like a moral compass for the company

• Frequently used in meetings: wildcard that can change decisions

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

• 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