How Google manages projects?
Part 1
What’s peculiar about making products in Big Tech companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook?
They not only make so-called socially important products but also try to change perception of the modern world.
Other companies understand this and so their employee try to learn a bit more about processes work and how to make life-changing products.
4xxi team is no exception — we learn from the best worldwide companies, we communicate with top IT experts regularly. Our last Q&A session was with Alex Rechevskiy and it was so amazingly useful, so we decided to share the video and text of the session with you.
For those of you who don’t know, Alex Rechevskiy is a Senior Product Manager in Google (San Francisco). Alex agreed to spend an hour with us and to respond to questions that have not been covered in previous interviews and in the YouTube channel.
After working with clients from Silicon Valley and NYC for 11 years we assumed that we knew everything about how to manage product development but after the session with Alex we got a lot of new and extremely valuable knowledge from the inside of Google: how you should think if you’re responsible to a billion of users and how you should lead hundreds of thousands of employees and produce fantastic products.
Let’s go!
In one of the latest interviews with Pavel Hegai (created one of the best networking communities in Russia that unities Big Tech top experts).
Alex shared his dilemma with us that got us hooked:
in Big Tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple you need to learn how to embrace and handle given freedom, which sounds fantastic on the one hand, but on the other hand no one tells you what to do.
This is why our Q&A session started with that.
What to do if no one tells you what to do?
Actually it’s the most difficult thing — to come up with ideas about what you can do. In fact, in Google, you have to solve tasks that you come up with by yourself.
However, it’s about product managers. If you consider Google or any company like Google, it’s product managers who tell others what to implement. Roughly speaking, they’re strategic leaders; they’re the ones who choose what and why should be done.
However they don’t decide how to do anything, that’s the responsibility of developers and engineers. Of course, some product managers do decide how to implement things, though sometimes they do not want to decide what and why should be done.
Big Tech companies are structured similarly as they inherit ideas and innovations from each other.
I.e. Google and Facebook have very similar culture: how kitchens and conference are arranged, how meetups are carried on, how business is built.
So, getting back to the topic, it depends on the level of expertise of a product manager and according to that product managers can solve certain problems.
By the way, we have these levels in Google: 3–4–5–6–7–8, then a director, a VP, a SVP and Sundar Pichai. Sundar is a great leader in Google, like Mark (Zuckerberg) is in Facebook.
I.e. if you’re a newbie in product management, it’s often for seniors to give you a future to develop or a part of a product to improve.
And you thoughts go like: so, here’s a feature like one in Google Maps or any other product; then there’re details — how it can be implemented, which services should be build in, what solution a user will have in the end etc.
When your level of expertise gets higher you start thinking about a part of a product or about a whole product by yourself. For example that be a product or a feature for advertisement department of the whole advertising market.
Then you learn how to think about several products at a time or about a huge product that is used by millions of people.
Then you can move on to the products. That’s responsibility of VP, SVP etc.
However, responsibilities of product managers of all levels are similar, the difference is that some are responsible for microfeatures, some — for main products of the company.
About decision-making and how company’s DNA affects that
“What to do” — in big companies it’s always a user’s call what does one want and why
We never ask “How can we earn some cash?”.
Though on Amazon they’re more interested in revenue, Facebook and Google are interested in user needs in the first place.
So if you know what your company’s DNA is, you can proceed from it.
For example, Google DNA is clear and it’s to take all information available in the universe and set it up in a way that would be useful for people.
All tasks are born from this goal.
So when we start thinking about what can be done, we think about who are users are, who they do and how we can be useful, what problem they can solve using our products.
Then you start thinking further — so ok, here’s a problem of a user and there’re microproblems.
Then you think about a lifecycle, so you imagine a user from the begging when they faced a problem in the first place. What did a user feel at that moment and how did they solve it?
After that you think about steps: 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th.
So now a user approached our product to solve a problem. What is the problem about? It can be both individual and universal. If we take a look at Google Maps, it’s hard to name only one problem that it helps with.
Surely, you can name navigation, routes, address search. Do you want to have a bite so place near your current location? Do you want to share your location with a friend?
There’s a million of ideas.
All of those depend on what you want to do, what kind of resolution you want to achieve — high level resolution, low level resolution or something else. Then you start thinking of a chosen direction and resolution level. What exactly does a user want to do?
Why, how, where, etc.
When you get to the point where understand all of the above, you can examine your current product: if it has any flows, what can be improved slightly or significantly. Can we suggest a feature that a user hasn’t thought of yet?
Then a user might have inner motivation and not superficial one.
How to get to the real problem of a user
Do you know why we need mobile and desktop games? They’re not needed, so we can have some fun. If you look deeper they help us with boredom. We play games when we’re bored.
When you consider your product as a game and start solving a problem in a way that might help a user with boredom, you start treating the problem differently.
Solution to a problem is not to cheer up a user. You start thinking what boredom is.
All the thinking gets to the point: what and why a user does, what they need and how our product can affect a user. You spend a lot of time to come up with a list of possible improvements, and after that you go through the list again so there’re only worthy improvements left that would affect a user’s life significantly.
If we consider not Google, but a small or medium size IT company, then you need to think of how any improvement might affect your company: how it’d affect revenues, how it’d affect performance and for how long. Then you think about costs, how it can be implemented, what difficulties might be faced.
Why business processes in Big Tech are different?
In Google and other Big Tech companies business processes differ from small or medium size IT companies. In smaller companies you come up with an idea and it takes a day to implement it. It might take up to 3 years in Google. You’ll need to discuss the idea with hundreds of people.
Your idea, suggestions, efforts — that’s your priority.
So basically that’s how we work. I have to think of each task very carefully since I’m the one to blame if some details of a task has not been thought through.
You cannot avoid personal responsibility.
How to balance team work and freedom
Even if talk about significant and drastic changes Big Tech companies tend to keep the process as free and democratic as it can be. Basically, you can start and run any product and no one will stop you. You just start discussing the idea with people you work with and who you trust, then you discuss it with excerpts of an area. However, you need to have at least some knowledge of the area otherwise you wouldn’t be able to come up with anything new.
You can document, by the way it’s a thing in the companies that if anything occurs, you start documenting it right away.
Here how it goes: you open Google Docs and type: “I have this feature. We need to solve this problem, I don’t think we’ve solved it yet. I have these ideas etc”
It can take 1–2 pages, doesn’t matter. You talk with engineers, product managers on another topic and in the end you can add that you’ll share the doc with them and you want to know their opinion.
People would start commenting on the doc: «That’s interesting, go talk to that guy. Have you thought about this? We implemented 95% similar feature 2 years ago and it was a failure».
It happens quite often because there a lot of people working for Big Tech who have entrepreneurial drive, and so they come up with new ideas all the time!
There are many docs like this.
Engineers can just start developing a thing and then say “Here! Done”. For example quite often engineers create chrome extensions or apps that can be used inside the company and that can improve our productivity. Actually we have a thousand of users that are employees.
You can start implementing ideas with them.
The Myth Of Google’s 20% Time
Google and companies a like has a concept, perhaps you’ve heard about it, called “20% time”
Once upon a time in Google they said that 20% of time is yours so you can generate new ideas, create new products etc.
So basically you have 1 day a week for your ideas. You can join your colleagues to create products. Obviously those products are intellectual property of Google, everything you create belongs to Google.
To be honest the “20% time” turned to be a joke inside Google and it’s called now “120% time”. Obviously no employee has so much free time in a working week. So if you want to create something of your own you do that in your weekend days.
Everyone works very hard. The process takes a lot of time. If you recall Stadia — games build into the browser — the idea behind it is great however there were specific details and problems, so it’s been 7 years of development.
I talked to the guy that come up with the idea of Stadia and suggest my help, and he told me “Yes, sure! You can start right away, let’s work together. What’s your area of expertise? Ok, so you can help with this and that”.
He was the one to tell me that’s been 7 years of development. Can you imagine it?
How we create new product for inner use
There’re many products that we know of and that we love which were created for inner use at the first place, i.e. it’s Gmail, Android, Stadia. It all started with a suggestion of a product manager, then persuaded an engineer to build the app and then the building of the app was very slow.
Since intellectual property belongs to Google you cannot run a startup in a field that Google specializes in. So it’s hard to come up with something new and unique since Big Tech companies are excepts in everything.
It’s common for employees to leave the company, create a startup and then get back to the company in several years. Their start up can be bought out, these employees can have a higher level position or the same position when they come back to the company.
This process is considered as a normal lifecycle of relations with an employee and can be discussed further.
If there’s obvious conflict of interest between an employee and Google, an employee won’t be able to do that. Any company wouldn’t allow that, and it makes sense.
How Google handles OKR and KPI
KPI is a performance indicator of certain activity or of achieving certain goals.
OKR is a methodology that is used in the modern product management; it allows synchronizing team and individual goals and ensure efficient monitoring of goals achievement.
Worth mentioning that since employees have only a few clearly defined tasks and a lot of freedom, when they started implementing OKR during the company growth, the hell broke loose. It was and still is to control hyper-growth.
OKR helped a bit, at least it gave us understanding where different departments of the company are directed to. OKR has to be formulated in a clear way and it has to be available for other departments and product managers.
We have KPI as well, which is not uncommon, however KPI is Google can be quite sophisticated i.e. any action, any costs (human or finances) has to be defined with KPI.
Surely there’s a mission, but it’s tremendous.
In Facebook it’s “to connect every person in the world.”,
in Google — ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Let’s give access to the internet to a billion of people. Let’s improve search queries Let’s make more cash for our advertisers. These are different KPI points. But then again, each team sets their own KPI
We don’t have a thing that a superior tells a team own KPI points, no, a team has to come up with it by themselves.
How we handle metrics
Let’s say we want to reduce turn for N users, to raise profits or to increase conversion (in percentage), or to increase growth.
A team can choose a metrics according to their tasks. Until a product is launched, the task is tho launch it.
Nothing new here.
Acquisition, engagement, a product lifecycle — we can use anything related to these.
If one works on a feature, we improve ML we can automate certain solutions and tasks. I.e. we want our ML models to be N% more effective whereas we have X errors. So if we achieve the goal, our product will be more successful.
Surely it starts with product managers or a product team, and they start discussing “Ok, what and why do we need to do, how will we know that we achieved a goal”. Then a big group of employed gathers together from different departments, and they discuss the matter all together: “Okay, your department has this goal, our department has that goal. It seems they fit each other”
Some OKRs can be presented to senior departments, divisions, that might have 10 thousand employees.
Obviously if you’re a SVP that looks over all Google advertising section, you won’t read thought OKR of each team. However, you can see the main OKRs. And as a product manager of any level you’d see the main OKR of a team.
In Google there’re many levels, features, products; all of them have to coordinated for a billion of users or a billion of dollars. Things that Top tech employees are responsible for are not always healthy to be implemented in start-ups or smaller companies.
In Big Tech you must know how to pick the best ideas and give up the worst ones.
