What I learned from “How Google works”

Melissa Xu
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

I recently connected with a Googler on LinkedIn and asked him if he could tell me what it is like working at Google over coffee. This Googler is incredibly nice, and he invited me to have lunch at Google. Yes, it’s free and delicious.

To prepare for this meeting, I read former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s and former VP of product Jonathan Rosenberg’s book “How Google Works”. It is a fascinating book and here is what I learned.


Catch the tailwind of trends

The book listed 3 powerful technology trends for the internet century:

Information: “The internet has made information free, copious, and ubiquitous — practically everything is online”.
Connectivity: “mobile devices and networks have made the global reach and continuous.”
Computing power: “Cloud computing has put practically infinite computing power and storage”.

The book was published 3 years ago. Back then artificial intelligence (AI) didn’t attract as much public interest as today. AI has been built on the above 3 trends and it is leading the next big technology transformation.

The power of being a platform

We all know that Google makes money from ads. Why does an advertising company do many other things, like email, maps, calendar, etc? Eric explained the concept of a platform in the book:

“A platform is, fundamentally, a set of products and services that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets.” Google “sets up platforms for customers and partners to interact, and uses those platforms to create highly differentiated products and services”, as well as build an entry barrier for competitors.

To become a successful and dominant platform, it needs users, a lot of users. This is why so many software companies start with free products, and they spend huge amounts of raised money on user acquisition. Eric Schmidt wrote in this book, “it’s not enough to just grow, you need to scale.”


How to get users?

“Product excellence is now paramount to business success — not control of information, not a stranglehold of information on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power.” As a product evangelist, I can’t agree more on this.

There are more than 100,000 new startups being created every day. Let’s face it. No matter how innovative your ideas are, there is probably someone, somewhere, making something similar. Therefore, the speed of product development and the quality of the product are critical. We need to deliver good products to users relentlessly and continuously, just like running a marathon with Usain Bolt’s speed.

How to ensure that every product is a success? Unfortunately, there is no such guarantee. Many startups can’t find product/market fit, and many incumbents can’t continue to find product/market fit.

Companies like Google experiment with new products all the time, and most of their experiments fail. But one thing makes them grow so fast: that they learn from their failures, and quickly apply what they learned into the next product development effort, and iterate quickly. One example is Google Glass: do you know that it has been relaunched recently into the enterprise market? Not too long after Google released it into the consumer market and failed.


In the end, I want to share my favorite quote from this book:

“Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation.”

This does not just apply to the technology industry, but also to our personal development. If we want to change the status quo, we often have to take risky and hard choices, and optimism helps us reach breakthroughs.

Melissa Xu

Written by

A marketer, product manager and engineer who loves new tech and yoga. melissaxu.com

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