Authors: Douglas Edwards
"Get a checkup," he instructed David Drummond. It had been a while since David had been to a doctor, and Eric wanted to be sure everyone was in good health for the challenges ahead.
"Buy a house with broadband," he lectured Bart Woytowicz, who complained about his slow Internet access at home. "Every one of you needs DSL or cable access."
"Develop better metrics for everything—from hiring women engineers to advertiser conversion rates," he reminded all of us. "And look for things we can patent."
I came away from the ops review determined to button down our marketing efforts and make them more systematic. My focus would be on supporting our revenue initiatives. And growing our international presence. And distilling our brand message. I had already put a fair amount of work into all three, but had really nailed the last one. The day before the offsite, I had sent our executives a list of five thematic messages for all Google communications—a distillation of a discussion I had been leading in our Baby Beagle group over the previous six months. We had started off looking for an alternative to "portal" to describe our business and ended up looking more deeply into our core identity as an institution.
"Google drives better decisions," I wrote. "Google technology makes things more accurate, while making them easier to use. Google is ubiquitous. Google creates information marketplaces. Google is a clear channel for information." I offered brief explanations and showed how each point related to core elements for our business, from our mission statement to our privacy policy. I suggested we brand our approach to problem solving as "GoogleLogic," a blanket identifier incorporating all of Google's unique attributes-a one-word answer to any question about how or why we did what we did. Our new secret sauce, if you will.
I believed I had identified the deep benefit of our brand for users (enabling better decisions) and developed an identity in GoogleLogic broad enough to encompass everything from our technology to our hiring process. It moved us well beyond PageRank, the name for Larry's original ranking algorithm. PageRank only applied to Google's search engine, and even there it had been largely supplanted over time. GoogleLogic positioned us on a much bigger playing field of products and services. And it had that nice echo of the
g
and the
l,
almost as if "Google" and "logic" were mirrored halves of the same entity.
Jonathan and Cindy and Susan sent positive feedback, but I heard nothing from Larry or Sergey. I pinged them a couple of days later. Still no response. When, after another two months, I finally pushed Sergey for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, I did it as an "assumptive sale": I assumed it was okay to publish our five thematic messages company-wide unless anyone had objections.
"I have an objection," came Sergey's long-awaited reply. "I think they need more thought." That was it. I'd been down this path before. I trapped him in his office and demanded more specific direction.
"Doug," he said, "I think you're slipping back into your old big-company ways. I don't know where this came from, but I don't see any point to it. Why do we need this kind of thing?"
Uh. Buduh. Duh. He apparently had no recollection of the six months of updates our Baby Beagle group had been sending him.
"I will not smite Sergey," I counseled myself. "I will not smite Sergey." I walked him through the process and the applications for a unified messaging strategy with press and our users. I explained the benefits of having a positioning platform that we could build brand extensions on. He shrugged. He didn't see it, but if it was that important to me, fine. I could post it on the marketing page on MOMA. I was glad to have such an enthusiastic endorsement from the man who, just a week before, had been named "Marketer of the Year" by
Marketing Computers
magazine.
And, of course, Sergey turned out to have a point. I had convinced myself that our engineers would love the concept of GoogleLogic. They didn't. It wasn't impressive enough. They suggested "GoogleMagic!" Now that, they said, had some punch to it.
Other than my colleagues in PR, no one at Google was thinking much about our messaging strategy. Not yet. It wasn't all that important to people focused on building products, even when George Reyes joined us as chief financial officer in September 2002—crossing another big item off our pre-IPO checklist. Presumably, if we ever went public, we'd need some coherent story to tell Wall Street, but no one seemed terribly concerned about that now.
I put it aside and dove into working with sales on winning more advertisers and helping our PMs prepare the products they were pushing through the pipeline. Tim Armstrong and his salespeople always seemed grateful for any effort we made on their behalf. Jonathan's group just got hungrier for more. We had a continual tug of war over who would do what and what was reasonable to expect, and Jonathan got tired of it. So when I copied him on a note confirming who would write a customer newsletter, his short fuse burned down to powder and he blew up.
"I don't want to get in an email debate over who owns what," he stormed to the group. "I can't get into monthly debates over ownership." There had been no debate in this case, just a reiteration of responsibilities. Unbeknownst to Jonathan, there was a performance issue with a member of marketing that needed to be documented in writing. My note had been intended in part to do that. Given Jonathan's VP role and his growing reputation as a forceful personality, it would have been easy to bow my head abjectly and apologize for the perceived error of my ways. I may have mentioned that I come from a stiff-necked people.
"Whoa," I responded, then let Jonathan know he had misinterpreted the intent of the email and that he was the only one sensing a conflict. I offered to take it offline with him if he thought clarifying responsibilities delayed execution rather than accelerating it. He backed down and came as close to an apology as he could without actually saying he was sorry. He privately explained his frustration about having a new team that had yet to mesh and seemed to be taking longer than necessary to get things done.
After that incident, we reached an understanding. Jonathan could be loud, insistent, and overbearing at times with his own staff, who seemed wary of his mercurial mood shifts. With me, though, he adopted a paternal air (despite my being three years older) and offered some level of respect—perhaps because I had not hesitated to return his fire.
So when Jonathan established a "chain gang" comprising new members of his team, he offered to have them work on low-level tasks in my department, such as checking that our partners were using our logo properly on their sites. Likewise, I offered his PMs my first-born son, Adam. At age fourteen, he needed something to get him out of the house over summer break. Jonathan threw some assignments Adam's way and, though he was too young to be paid, gifted him with a new iPod when the work was done.
I appreciated Jonathan's generosity and took his eccentricities in stride. "Look, I'm on a scooter!" he once shouted as he rode past Sergey and a reporter interviewing him. Later he told me he wanted the reporter to write about the wacky ways of Googlers—not one of the key messages in Cindy's PR plan.
"Look! I'm a human pop-up ad!" he exclaimed on another occasion, walking in front of me as I presented to a group of Wharton MBA candidates.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our VP of product management," I murmured as he strode on down the hall followed by their incredulous stares.
And I definitely picked up on tension between Cindy and Jonathan over his ambition to do greater things at Google. The first logical way to expand his empire would be to annex Cindy's small corporate marketing group. She made it clear that issues in his own backyard needed addressing before he made any moves toward her domain. "I was hoping
you
would tell
us
the next step," she pointedly responded when he offered to help resolve an issue about pricing for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). "Maybe a conversation with your PM? Or some decisive action?" At other times her tone was even terser, as when she insisted that she needed to interview any candidate for a job with "marketing" in the title. The tension ebbed and flowed with shifts in the overall barometric pressure within the Plex. One day Cindy and Jonathan were rivals, the next, the closest of colleagues.
My own issues with Jonathan's group settled into a low simmer and I hoped to keep them there. I admonished my group not to wallow in an us-versus-them mentality regarding the PM group. I admitted my own sins in demonizing Jonathan's team and suggested we focus on getting things done, not on the obstacles that might stand in our way. I said that if my direct reports came to me with a complaint about a colleague's demands or behavior, I would first ask if they had addressed the issue with the person involved and what thoughts they had about solutions.
Those rules didn't apply in product management, however. When Marissa felt too much marketing attention was being paid to the GSA at the expense of her
Google.com
initiatives, she came straight to Cindy. In particular, she felt we weren't sufficiently supportive of Krishna Bharat's soon-to-be-launched Google news service, a product in which she had developed a special interest. At the same time, the GSA team hammered us daily for more ways to generate sales leads, despite the relatively small revenue the Search Appliance represented. In trying to balance the needs of two different product groups, I was pleasing neither. I informed Cindy that going forward I would focus more effort on consumer marketing for
Google.com
, and I began thinking about ways to do that without spending any money on advertising.
I could not deny, though, that Jonathan was putting in place a strong and disciplined structure for product management. He understood the data-driven decision-making mindset of our corporate leaders and gave us sound guidance on how to move projects past them. "Board members don't want lists of possible ideas," he pointed out as we prepared a presentation about getting more users to download the Google toolbar. "They just want to know exactly what we're going to do and when we're going to do it." Time and again he sent slides back for more data, until they were dense with numbers and graphs and pointed to inescapable conclusions.
I learned things by listening to him. But that didn't stop me from bringing my bazooka-sized water gun from home and unloading on him as he washed Cindy's car.
The influx of PMs, APMs, and PMMs filling out Jonathan's org chart reinforced Google's meritocratic culture. Most were young. All had impressive credentials. Jonathan made sure everyone knew how high he had set the bar by distributing the résumés of those who had
not
made the cut. He wanted his staff to feel elite and Eric to rest assured there would be no bozo invasion on his watch. All these brilliant tyros caught on campuses and released in our cube farm impressed and unsettled me. Jonathan was right, I concluded. The quality of employees, at least on paper, was improving. I knew my questionable GPA and lonely BA would not make the cut if I had to meet Google's revised hiring standards.
I remember attending a product-review meeting in Larry and Sergey's office with Nikhil Bhatla, an APM so fresh out of Stanford that the ink on his sheepskin was still wet. When the meeting broke up, I stayed to harass Sergey about a marketing question he had been avoiding. Time like this was precious, because it was the only way to force decisions on issues not key to keeping the site up and running.
As the group filed out, I started making my case to Sergey, expecting to have five minutes mano-a-mano in which to persuade him. I was surprised when he looked over my shoulder at Nikhil, whose curiosity had caused him to linger. "What do you think of this idea?" Sergey asked him, then listened carefully as Nikhil laid out a cogent, well-argued response that poked enough holes in my idea to fill the Albert Hall.
I confess, I wasn't happy that this ... this whippersnapper with no experience at Google was sitting in judgment of my proposal. Didn't he realize he was a junior staff member and shouldn't be within earshot to begin with? This would never have happened at the good ol'
Merc,
where proprieties of rank were carefully observed and it would have been unseemly, impolitic, and career-threatening to blatantly refute a manager in front of the company's top executive.
After walking briskly around the Plex a few times to cool off, I came to realize that Nikhil had made valid points. I also realized that I shouldn't have been surprised. It didn't matter that he'd only been on the job a short while. He was a smart guy. He didn't require immersion in Google's milieu to construct a logical argument when asked to do so.
That I took this lesson to heart can be seen in my own response, a year later, to an executive from another large technology firm with whom I was negotiating. I wanted his company's software for creating web pages to include an easy way to incorporate a Google search box. I had brought Priti Chinai, a recent hire from our business-development team, into the discussion. The outside exec let me know privately that, no offense, but Priti was too junior for him to waste time with. He only dealt with decision-making VPs.
"No offense taken, I said, "but you need to understand how Google works. We don't have senior VPs. We have Larry and Sergey and everybody else. The VPs we do have are involved in functional roles, like driving engineering projects. I understand your wanting to cut through bureaucratic layers, but if Priti recommends we do the deal, it will end up in front of Eric, Larry, and Sergey for sign-off. If she recommends against it, it won't go very far. If she needs more input, she knows all the people to ask." I found myself annoyed that he had the audacity to assume any Googler on our team couldn't have put the deal together after fifteen minutes of preparation.