Hot Take: Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy

Or, Why Google keeps killing products

I was devastated when Google Reader shut down. I loved it as much as I love Microsoft Excel, and for the same reason: it gave me a superpower. With Reader, I could discover and stay on top of the latest information across the internet, no matter how frequently or infrequently a person posted.

I’ve watched many beloved Google products get shut down: Wave, Inbox, My Maps, Stadia. The list goes on and on. It’s gotten bad enough that people widely believe the shutdowns damage Google’s brand.

So why do they keep doing it?

Because Google has a company strategy, but they don’t make product strategies.

Google’s Company Strategy

Based on my time at Google, and everything I’ve seen since, Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.

Google acts like a venture capitalist, investing in promising people with the expectation that most will fail. They invest broadly in search of the idea that will deliver 100x. Let 1000 flowers bloom, and see which are the best.

To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up a new project. The culture of “20% time” gives people permission to work on ideas outside of their primary role. There’s only the lightest of reviews needed to launch a “1% experiment.” Micro-kitchens and fun activities encourage the socializing that brings ad-hoc teams together.

Google’s company strategy is closely tied to the lack of product strategy. To explain this, let me contrast with Microsoft.

Microsoft vs Google Product Strategy

At Microsoft, product leaders had a strong conviction of what it would take to succeed.

Steven Sinofsky was the VP in charge of the Office division at the time I was there. He wrote long strategy documents about what we were building, why, and how. The VP below him then created a strategy document that filled in the details for the Office Server Group. And the GPM below him then wrote a strategy document for SharePoint. By the time you got down to me, I was responsible for delivering a very constrained slice of the product. Each piece fit into the larger puzzle.

My work was pre-approved. There was space for me to plan what my teams worked on, but each item needed to tie into a pillar of the broader Office strategy. Everything I wanted to build was reviewed during an“adds/cuts” meeting before it got started.

With all that up-front planning, the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs, and only me and the tester (also new grads usually) reviewed the working changes before they were added to the branch. For what it’s worth, I think this is why the quality of the details on Microsoft products is often lacking—a random PM made a decision and no one bothered to push back on it.

Contrast that with Google.

At Google, I never saw a strategy document. I went to every Friday all-hands, but I didn’t hear the leaders talk about a broad vision of what we needed to build. The people above me didn’t set direction and ask me to follow it.

Instead, leaders encouraged teams to generate their own ideas. The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!

Microsoft would have shut all those other projects down. Google let them have a chance. But just a chance.

These projects weren’t pre-approved. There was no guarantee that your work would launch. Google didn’t really care if they launched, even if your team had spent months on it. Each new feature, product, or change needed to prove itself.

As an APM, I loved this. I told candidates that Google was a much better environment than Microsoft for smart and ambitious people, because there was space to make your ideas happen. At Microsoft, everything was so top down. Leaders had already decided what we needed to build, so I’d felt like I was swimming upstream to get my ideas heard.

In retrospect, I don’t think my feelings matched reality. Yes, I’d felt like I was swimming upstream, but the big ideas I’d fought for (Firefox support, Wikis) actually launched. I cobbled them together whispering with engineers and relying on interns, but no one was mad when they found out. Google had the advantage that the culture supported pushing for new ideas, but at a cost.

The Cost of Google’s Company Strategy

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash

Google’s company strategy works, but I think it comes at the expense of the employees and users. It especially comes at a cost to medium-scale products.

About two years into my time at Google, two engineers from the Trondheim, Norway office came to meet me. They’d spent the last few months trying to improve a particular type of query popular in Norway. Now they wanted my help launching it.

It was immediately obvious to me that the idea was flawed. Their change didn’t make the search results better, and it unfairly promoted some sites over others. I checked with the engineering leadership and they agreed. Those engineers had been wasting their time.

I tried to figure out who was the right person to deliver the bad news. I was shocked to learn that it was me. I’d never heard from those engineers or anyone on their team before. The project had been started and worked on (I think even A/B tested), without any input from the people who would ultimately need to approve their change. A few months later, the entire Norway office was shut down.

…

I was at Google when Google Plus started. Some APMs had convinced company leadership that we needed a Facebook competitor. The VP in charge of Google Plus hosted the Friday all-hands several times to get us all excited about what they were building. It was obvious to me and many others that there was no reason for people already on Facebook to switch from Facebook. Someone asked a direct question, but the VP deflected and talked about how easy it would be to group your friends with the Circles feature — which was not at all a reason to switch.

It seemed like Google didn’t have the processes or experience to get the product strategy right. “Who are our potential users and what does it take to win them?” is product strategy 101. Maybe someone raised this question in an exec review, but it didn’t become a launch blocker. Google+ never took off, and was eventually shut down.

I think the lack of a product strategy is behind many of Google’s short-lived products. Projects like Google Wave, Google Inbox, or Stadia get the go-ahead without a deep, structured, well-reviewed plan for how they’re going to succeed and why they’re important. Some smart, ambitious person at the company spear-heads the project and pushes it through to launch. When the product isn’t a runaway success, Google cuts its losses and moves on to the next thing.

If Google didn’t start with a conviction that they needed the product, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the stamina to keep iterating and investing. Most other companies don’t have the money to build and launch products with such little conviction and oversight. Other companies need their products to succeed, so they try harder & smarter to make the products successful.

In closing

Why do I care? Google Reader was around long enough to drive Bloglines out of business. Google Inbox was around long enough to drive Mailbox out of business. I miss those products.

I usually avoid such pointed critiques, but I’m sharing my thoughts here because one of my key personal values is that I think people’s time and effort is precious.

I was drawn to Asana because the world would be a better place if people spent less time on work-about-work and more time doing what they love.

I care about product strategy because the world would be a better place if people spend less time on failed projects and more time working on things that make a difference.

I hope that people who choose to work at Google can do so with their eyes open. I still think the company can be a wonderful place to work, but only if you’re okay with the risk that your product work might be wasted.

I’m sure some of my memories and analysis here is wrong. I’d love you to share your corrections, disagreements, memories, and analysis in the comments!