Stay on top of your projects, not your people.

When I left Google last year, I knew that I’d miss the people and the “anything is possible” mentality, but now that I’m on the outside, I miss something that I would never have anticipated: Google’s internal systems.

In addition to working to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, Google has spent untold fortunes studying and perfecting the employee experience. Google’s cafes, its child care centers and its controversial employee shuttles have been widely reported on — these things are easy to see and understand from the outside. What’s not evident from the outside is the amount of work that Google devotes to making it pleasant to be an employee.

• Want to quickly understand your current and projected total compensation (cash, stock and benefits)? There’s a system for that.
• Want to publicly recognize another employee for a job well done? There’s a system for that.
• Want to reward employees for planning travel in advance? There’s a system for that.
• Want to keep tabs on individual and team progress without a lot of process overhead? There’s a system for that — called Snippets — and it’s the internal system at Google that I miss most of all.

Here’s how Google’s Snippets system worked: at the close of each week, members of my team would send a brief summary of progress on current projects and set of high level objectives for the upcoming week via e-mail to weekly@google.com. Every Monday, the system would merge all of the individual submissions it received into a nicely formatted report, which was then distributed via e-mail to my entire team and posted on an internal website.

As an individual, the Snippets process forced me to spend a few minutes each week reflecting on my progress in the current week and my objectives for the upcoming week. The weekly ritual was a lightweight way to ensure that I was spending time on high impact activities vs reacting to what hit my inbox.

As a teammate, the Snippets process gave me visibility into how peers (those that I did not have regular 1:1 meetings with) were spending their time. If I wanted to passively keep tabs on a specific product team’s progress without sitting in on all of their meetings, I could create a report for a collection of users or all members of an e-mail alias.

As a manager, the Snippets process allowed me to hear directly from folks around the world at all levels about what they were working on and where they were running into internal or external roadblocks. Before 1:1s and team meetings, I’d review snippets to look for areas where I could be helpful or those I wanted to dive deeper on.

Google’s Snippets system is built entirely on email. There is no app to install, no frankendoc or massive spreadsheet to contend with (Google Docs is great for many things, but status tracking / reporting across a large team isn’t one of them). If you can send an e-mail, you can use Snippets.

Matt Tanase and I set out to bring the benefits of Snippets to the rest of the world — or at least, to the growing number of teams using Slack. If Google’s lightweight but effective process sounds like it could be useful for you and your team, we’d like to introduce you to SnippetsBot. There’s no separate app, no separate website, the entire application exists inside of Slack. If you can use Slack, you can use SnippetsBot!