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How Google Works

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How Google Works

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They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.

They believed that if they created great services, they could figure out the money stuff later.

They felt that attracting and leading the very best engineers was the only way for Google to thrive and achieve its lofty ambitions.

“Have you ever seen a scheduled plan that the team beat?” he asked. Um, no. “Have your teams ever delivered better products than what was in the plan?” No again. “Then what’s the point of the plan? It’s holding us back. There must be a better way. Just go talk to the engineers.”

So we found ourselves, at this critical moment in the company’s history, stuck in the middle. We could do what Moritz wanted and write a traditional business plan. That would keep our board happy, but it would not motivate or inspire our employees, it would not help attract the new talent the company so desperately needed, and it wouldn’t address the strategic dynamics of this brand-new industry. Most important, the company’s founders would kill it before it ever saw the light of day. And maybe fire the two of us while they were at it.

One of the biggest reasons for our success, though, is that the plan we delivered to the board that day in 2003 wasn’t much of a plan at all. There were no financial projections or discussions of revenue streams. There was no market research on what users, advertisers, or partners wanted or how they fit into nicely defined market segments. There was no concept of market research or discussion of which advertisers we would target first. There was no channel strategy or discussion of how we would sell our ad products. There was no concept of an org chart, with sales doing this, product doing that, and engineering doing some other that. There was no product roadmap detailing what we would build and when. There was no budget. There were no targets or milestones that the board and company leaders could use to monitor our progress.

The result of all this turmoil is that product excellence is now paramount to business success—not control of information, not a stranglehold on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power (although these are still important).

As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that

Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.

rotate in and out of different roles every two years or so. But this approach emphasizes the development of management skills, not technical ones. As a result, most knowledge workers in traditional environments develop deep technical expertise but little breadth, or broad management expertise but no technical depth.

They are not confined to specific tasks. They are not limited in their access to the company’s information and computing power. They are not averse to taking risks, nor are they punished or held back in any way when those risky initiatives fail. They are not hemmed in by role definitions or organizational structures; in fact, they are encouraged to exercise their own ideas. They don’t keep quiet when they disagree with something. They get bored easily and shift jobs a lot. They are multidimensional, usually combining technical depth with business savvy and creative flair. In other words, they are not knowledge workers, at least not in the traditional sense. They are a new kind of animal, a type we call a “smart creative,” and they are the key to achieving success in the Internet Century.

The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.

And who, exactly, is this smart creative? A smart creative has deep technical knowledge in how to use the tools of her trade,21 and plenty of hands-on experience. In our industry, that means she is most likely a computer scientist, or at least understands the tenets and structure of the systems behind the magic you see on your screens every day.

Not every smart creative has all of these characteristics, in fact very few of them do. But they all must possess business savvy, technical knowledge, creative energy, and a hands-on approach to getting things done. Those are the fundamentals.

Their common characteristic is that they work hard and are willing to question the status quo and attack things differently. This is why they can have such an impact.

Employees expect much more from their companies now, and they are often not getting it.

Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.

Culture stems from founders, but it is best reflected in the trusted team the founders form to launch their venture. So ask that team: What do we care about? What do we believe? Who do we want to be? How do we want our company to act and make decisions?

Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.

Employees should always have the option to retire to a quiet place when they’ve had it with all the group stimulation, which is why our offices include plenty of retreats: nooks in the cafés and microkitchens, small conference rooms, outdoor terraces and spaces, and even nap pods. But when they go back to their desk, they should be surrounded by their teammates.

In the Internet Century, a product manager’s job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products. Some of this entails the traditional administrative work around owning the product life cycle, defining the product roadmap, representing the voice of the consumer, and communicating all that to the team and management. Mostly, though, smart-creative product managers need to find the technical insights that make products better.

Messiness is not an objective in itself (if it was, we know some teens who would be great hires), but since it is a frequent by-product of self-expression and innovation, it’s usually a good

This is another way to kill facilities envy among smart creatives: Be very generous with the resources they need to do their work. Be stingy with the stuff that doesn’t matter, like fancy furniture and big offices, but invest in the stuff that does.

We invest in our offices because we expect people to work there, not from home. Working from home during normal working hours, which to many represents the height of enlightened culture, is a problem that—as Jonathan frequently says—can spread throughout a company and suck the life out of its workplace.

Make your offices crowded and load them with amenities, then expect people to use them.

Hippos are dangerous in companies too, where they take the form of the Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.

You need to have confidence in your people, and enough self-confidence to let them identify a better way.

For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an “obligation to

Meritocracies yield better decisions and create an environment where all employees feel valued and empowered. They demolish the culture of fear, the murky, muddy environment in which hippos prefer to wallow. And they remove biases that can hamper greatness.

We believe in staying functionally organized—with separate departments such as engineering, products, finance, and sales reporting directly to the CEO—as long as possible, because organizing around business divisions or product lines can lead to the formation of silos, which usually stifle the free flow of information and people. Having separate P&Ls seems like a good way to measure performance, but it can have the unfortunate side effect of skewing behavior: The leaders of a business unit are motivated to prioritize their unit’s P&L over the company’s. If you do have P&Ls, make sure they are driven by real external customers and partners.

Since there is no perfect organizational design, don’t try to find one. Get as close as you can and let your smart creatives figure out the rest.

You want to invest in the people who are going to do what they think is right, whether or not you give them permission. You’ll find that those people will usually be your best smart creatives.

Once you identify the people who have the biggest impact, give them more to do. When you pile more responsibility on your best people, trust that they will keep taking it on or tell you when enough is enough. As the old saying goes: If you want something done, give it to a busy person.

Humans are at their best when surrounded by social controls, and crowded offices have lots of social controls!)

You must always be firm with the people who violate the basic interests of the company. Don’t bite them, but do act swiftly and decisively. Nip crazy in the bud.

Manage this by giving people responsibility and freedom. Don’t order them to stay late and work or to go home early and spend time with their families. Instead, tell them to own the things for which they are responsible, and they will do what it takes to get them done.

burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to

No is like a tiny death to smart creatives. No is a signal that the company has lost its start-up verve, that it’s too corporate. Enough no’s, and smart creatives stop asking and start heading to the exits.

Part of the fun comes from inhaling the fumes of future success. But a lot of it comes from laughing and joking and enjoying the company of your coworkers.

A defining mark of a fun culture is identical to that of an innovative one: The fun comes from everywhere. The key is to set the boundaries of what is permissible as broadly as possible.

While establishing a culture in a start-up is relatively easy, changing the culture of an ongoing enterprise is extraordinarily difficult, but even more critical to success: A stagnant, overly “corporate” culture is anathema to the average smart creative.

Promote transparency and sharing of ideas across divisions. Open up everyone’s calendar so that employees can see what other employees are doing. Hold more company-wide meetings and encourage honest questions without reprisal. And when you get those tough questions, answer them honestly and authentically.

Every company needs a “Don’t be evil,” a cultural lodestar that shines over all management layers, product plans, and office politics.

That is the power of a great culture: It can make each member of the company better. And it can make the company ascendant.

MBA-style business plans, no matter how well conceived and thought out, are always flawed in some important way.

This is why a venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan. Since the plan is wrong, the people have to be right. Successful teams spot the flaws in their plan and adjust.

In fact, it’s fine to have a plan, but understand that it will change as you progress and discover new things about the products and market.

Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.

Product leaders create product plans, but those product plans often (usually!) lack the most important component: What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or platforms will be built? A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor. The result is something that is better than the competition in a fundamental way. The improvement is often obvious; it doesn’t take a lot of marketing for customers to figure out that this product is different from everything else.

You will never disrupt an industry or transform your business, and you’ll never get the best smart creatives on board, if your strategy is narrowly based on leveraging your competitive advantage to attack related markets.

Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn’t yet know he wants.

There’s nothing wrong with continuous improvement and smart business tactics, but the tail is wagging the dog when market research becomes more important than technical innovation.

The best products had achieved their success based on technical factors, not business ones, whereas the less stellar ones lacked technical distinction.

We are entering what lead Google economist Hal Varian calls a new period of “combinatorial innovation.” This occurs when there is a great availability of different component parts that can be combined or recombined to create new inventions.

Who are the geeks in your company? The guys in the labs and studios working on new, interesting stuff? Whatever that stuff is, that’s your technology. Find the geeks, find the stuff, and that’s where you’ll find the technical insights you need to drive success.

When you base your product strategy on technical insights, you avoid me-too products that simply deliver what customers are asking for. (Henry Ford: “If I had listened to customers, I would have gone out looking for faster

we asked the product managers for all of our major products in the pipeline to describe in a few sentences the technical insight upon which they were building their plan.

“What is your technical insight?” turns out to be an easy question to ask and a hard one to answer. So for your products, ask the question. If you can’t articulate a good answer, rethink the product.

The most successful leaders in the Internet Century will be the ones who understand how to create and quickly grow platforms. A platform is, fundamentally, a set of products and services that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets.69 Platforms are increasingly (if not exclusively) technology based.

As they grow and get more valuable, they attract more investment, which helps to improve the products and services the platform supports. This is why, in the technology industry, companies always think “platforms, not products.”

As Coase put it, “a firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an exchange on the open market or the costs of organizing in another

Don Tapscott put it well in Wikinomics, when he wrote that “the Internet has caused transaction costs to plunge so steeply that it has become much more useful to read Coase’s law, in effect, backward: Nowadays firms should shrink until the cost of performing a transaction internally no longer exceeds the cost of performing it

Lots of companies build networks to lower their costs, but fewer do so to transform their products or business model.

Whereas the twentieth century was dominated by monolithic, closed networks, the twenty-first will be driven by global, open ones. There are platform opportunities all around us. The successful leaders are the ones who discover them.

But generally it means sharing more intellectual property such as software code or research results, adhering to open standards rather than creating your own, and giving customers the freedom to easily exit your platform.

With open, you trade control for scale and innovation.83 And trust that your smart creatives will figure it out.

“no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone

We want to compete on a level playing field and win users’ loyalty based on merit. When customers have low barriers to exit, you have to work to keep them.

If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative.

As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy’s successes are also your successes.”90 Be proud of your competitors. Just don’t follow them.

Smart coaches know that no amount of strategy can substitute for talent, and that is as true in business as it is on the field. Scouting is like shaving: If you don’t do it every day, it shows.

Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it.

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change.

Jonathan’s modus operandi is to ask candidates to reflect on a past mistake. In the early 2000s, he used to ask candidates “What big trend did you miss about the Internet in 1996? What did you get right, and what did you get wrong?” It’s a deceptively tricky question. It makes candidates define what they expected, link it to what they observed and explore the revelations, and forces them to admit a mistake—and not in the lame, my-biggest-weakness-is-that-I’m-a-perfectionist sort of way. It’s impossible to fake the answer.

We institutionalized the LAX test by making “Googleyness” one of four standard sections—along with general cognitive ability, role-related knowledge, and leadership experience—on our interview feedback form. This includes ambition and drive, team orientation, service orientation, listening & communication skills, bias to action, effectiveness, interpersonal skills, creativity, and integrity.

Laszlo Bock’s upcoming book, Work Rules!

  • ver que lo lea Liss

The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

Smart creatives today may not share many characteristics with professional athletes, but they do share one important thing: the potential for disproportionate impact. Top performers get paid well in athletics, and they should in business too. If you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward it disproportionately.

But what’s most important in the Internet Century is product excellence, so it follows that big rewards should be given to the people who are closest to great products and innovations. This

hell to keep them. The best way to retain smart creatives is to not let them get too comfortable, to always come up with ways to make their jobs interesting.

But often it takes more than interesting side projects to keep people engaged and prevent them from leaving. You need to prioritize the interests of the highly valued individual over the constraints of the organization.

Salar helped invent AdWords and spent several years in the product organization, but when he was ready to expand his responsibilities and become a general manager, we didn’t have a role for him. So we created one, appointing him the head of YouTube. There are numerous other cases like this, where smart creatives need or want to do something new and the company figures out a way to make it happen. Do the best thing for the person and make the organization adjust.

Even if you keep your best people challenged and engaged, some of them will still consider leaving for greener pastures. When that happens, focus your retention efforts on the stars, the leaders, and the innovators (not necessarily the same people), and do whatever it takes to keep them around. The loss of these people can have a big ripple effect, as they often inspire their followers to leave too. Because people seldom leave over compensation, the first step to keeping them is to listen. They want to be heard, to be relevant and valued.

creative has an attractive offer in hand from another company. Sometimes that person will negotiate with an either/or threat: “Either do this, or else I’m out of here.” When that happens, the game is usually already over, since someone who operates that way is not emotionally attached to the company anymore and is unlikely to rebuild that commitment.

founding CEO of LinkedIn notes, “Just because a job ends, your relationship with your employee doesn’t have to…. The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni

All the factors that make the right smart creatives great hires can make the wrong ones hell to fire: their intensity, their confidence, their fearlessness. So always keep in mind, from the outset, that the best way to avoid having to fire underperformers is not to hire them.

There are some people who actually enjoy firing. Beware of them. Firing instills a culture of fear that will inevitably fail, and “I’ll just fire them” is an excuse for not investing the time to execute the hiring process well.

We are in the era of big data, and big data needs statisticians to make sense of it. The democratization of data means that those who can analyze it well will win. Data is the sword of the twenty-first century, those who wield it well, the samurai. So start sharpening that blade, uruwashii,117 and take statistics.

One of the best, easiest ways to get ahead in a field is to know more about it. The best way to do that is to read.

Formulating a strategy, hiring the right people, and creating a unique culture are all preliminaries to the fundamental activity of all businesses and business leaders: decision-making.

when it comes to making decisions, you can’t just focus on making the right one. The process by which you reach the decision, the timing of when you reach it, and the way it is implemented are just as important as the decision itself.

We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.”

As a leader, it is best not to get lost in details you don’t understand, but rather trust the smart people who work for you to understand them.

consensus is not about getting everyone to agree. Instead, it’s about coming to the best idea for the company and rallying around it.

Reaching this best idea requires conflict. People need to disagree and debate their points in an open environment, because you won’t get buy-in until all the choices are debated openly.

If you are in charge, do not state your position at the outset of the process. The job is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard, regardless of their functional role, which is harder to achieve when the top dog puts a stake in the ground.

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

Once everyone weighs in with an opinion, then the argument will be on, and everyone can participate in the decision-making process and have their voice be heard. A proper consensus-driven process has elements of inclusion (involving all the stakeholders in a participatory manner); cooperation (aiming for the best decision for the group, sometimes at the expense of a minority or individual); and equality (everyone on the team counts and can at least temporarily engage in blocking behavior). Above all it is solution-oriented: The right decision is the best decision, not the lowest common denominator decision upon which everyone agrees. And it’s not always your solution. As Coach Wooden once said, “Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own

the executive, “even if it’s wrong.” Tom Peters would call Bill’s attitude in this situation a “bias for action,” and his book In Search of Excellence lists it as a top common attribute of the companies he

If you’re not sure if a course of action is right, the best thing you can do is try it out and then correct

The job of the decision-maker, then, is to get the timing just right. Exhibit a bias for action, to cut off debate and analysis that is no longer valuable, and start moving the team to rally around the decision. But don’t be a slave to a sense of urgency. Maintain flexibility until the last possible moment.

So a key skill to develop as the CEO or senior leader in a company is to know which decisions to make and which to let run their course without you.

Leadership teams often underestimate how long it takes for revenue from a new product area to ramp up. That shiny new stuff can be much more interesting than the boring old core business stuff, but it’s the core stuff that pays the bills, and if you make a mistake there, you probably won’t be able to recover.

OKRs are another great example of transparency. These are an individual’s Objectives (the strategic goals to accomplish) and Key Results (the way in which progress toward that goal is measured). Every employee updates and posts his OKRs company-wide every quarter, making it easy for anyone to quickly find anyone else’s priorities. When you meet someone at Google and want to learn more about what they do, you go on Moma and read their OKRs. This isn’t just a job title and description of the role, it’s their first-person account of the stuff they are working on and care about. It’s the fastest way to figure out what motivates them.

But there’s a right way to overcommunicate and a wrong way. In the Internet Century, the typical method, especially given the ease of the technology, is to share more stuff with more people. See an interesting article? Cut and paste the link into an email and send it to anyone who may be remotely interested. Yay! You’ve overcommunicated! You’ve also wasted hours of people’s time. Overcommunication done wrong leads to a careless proliferation of useless information, an avalanche of drivel piling into already overwhelmed inboxes.

Most businesspeople go to staff meetings. You have probably lived through hundreds of them, so you already know what their agenda is: Receive status updates, conduct administrivia, nap with eyes open, check email surreptitiously under the table, wonder what mistakes in life were made to warrant this torture. The problem with the typical staff meeting is that it is organized around functional updates, rather than around the key issues facing the team, so you may end up spending too much time on things that don’t matter (do you really need a weekly update on everything?) and not enough on things that do. This structure also reinforces the organizational boxes around people—Pam is in quality control, Jason is the sales guy—rather than creating a forum where everyone has a stake in the key issues of the day.

Make sure you would work for yourself. If you are so bad as a manager that you as a worker would hate working for you, then you have some work to do.

  1. Make it easy to follow up on requests. When you send a note to someone with an action item that you want to track, copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.” That makes it easy to find and follow up on the things that haven’t been done; just resend the original note with a new intro asking “Is this done?” 9. Help your future self search for stuff. If you get something you think you may want to recall later, forward it to yourself along with a few keywords that describe its content. Think to yourself, How will I search for this later? Then, when you search for it later, you’ll probably use those same search terms.

The goals of a board meeting are harmony, transparency, and advice. You want to exit the meeting with the board’s support of your strategy and tactics. You need to be completely transparent in everything you communicate. And you want to hear their advice, even if you plan to ignore it—they are usually trying to be helpful, and cannot have all the context that you have. Another way to put this: You want their noses in, but fingers

If managing partnerships is like diplomacy, then it stands to reason that it needs to be conducted by diplomats. For the most important partnerships, companies should create a role with the objective of serving dual constituencies: To keep the external partner happy, while also pursuing the interests of their own company.154 This is different from a traditional sales role, which is often weighted toward the company’s interests, not the partner’s.

One advantage of hierarchical, process-laden organizations is that it’s easy to figure out with whom you need to talk: Just look for the right box on the right chart, and you’ve got your person. But the steady state of a successful Internet Century venture is chaos. When things are running perfectly smoothly, with people and boxes on charts enjoying a one-to-one relationship, then the processes and infrastructure have caught up to the business. This is a bad thing.

(Champion racecar driver Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast

The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be. And when you’re there, the only way to get things done is through relationships. Take the time to know and care about people.

To us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. Since “novel” is often just a fancy synonym for “new,” we should also clarify that for something to be innovative it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising.

For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.

Before there can be innovation, there needs to be the proper context for innovation. This is usually found in markets that are growing quickly and full of competition

But usually there’s a reason the market is empty: It’s not big enough to sustain a growing venture. It still may be a good business opportunity—someone must make money off of all those niche products we see in the SkyMall catalog—but if you want to create an environment of innovation, it’s better to look for big markets with huge growth potential. Remember, Google was late to the search-engine party, not early.

“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”

When creating a movement, attracting the first follower is the most crucial step. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

Google knows that in the Internet Century user trust is just as important as dollars, euros, pounds, yen, or any other currency. Product excellence is the only way for a company to be consistently successful, so our prime directive when it comes to product strategy is to focus on the user (while not interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations).

At Google, our users are the people who use our products, while our customers are the companies that buy our advertising and license our technology. There are rarely conflicts between the two, but when there are, our bias is toward the user. It has to be this way, regardless of your industry. Users are more empowered than ever, and won’t tolerate crummy products.

The obvious benefit of thinking big is that it gives smart creatives much more freedom. It removes constraints and spurs creativity. Astro Teller, the head of Google[x], notes that if you want to create a car that gets 10 percent better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design, but if you want to get one that gets five hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process—How would I start over?—can spur ideas that were previously not considered.

Give the wrong people a big challenge, and you’ll induce anxiety. But give it to the right people, and you’ll induce

70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.

While the 70/20/10 rule ensured that our core business would always get the bulk of the resources and that the promising, up-and-coming areas would also get investment, it also ensured that the crazy ideas got some support too, and were protected from the inevitable budget cuts. And 10 percent isn’t a lot of resources, which is fine, because overinvesting in a new concept is just as problematic as underinvesting, since it can make it much harder to admit failure later on. Million-dollar ideas are a lot harder to kill than thousand-dollar ones, so overinvestment can create a situation wherein willful confirmation bias—the tendency to see only the good things in projects in which a lot has been invested—obscures sound decision-making.

Ten percent also works because creativity loves constraints.178 It’s why pictures have frames and sonnets have fourteen lines. It’s why Henry Ford set pricing for his cars so low, because he knew that “We make more discoveries concerning manufacturing and selling under this forced method than by any method of leisurely investigation”.179 A lack of resources forces ingenuity.

When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it. As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, “The human race built most nobly when limitations were

The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn’t the products and features that get created, it’s the things that people learn when they try something new. Most 20 percent projects require people to practice or develop skills outside of those they use on a day-to-day basis, often collaborating with colleagues they don’t regularly work with. Even if these projects rarely yield some new, wow innovation, they always yield smarter smart creatives. As Urs Hölzle likes to point out, 20 percent time may be the best educational program a company can have.

Then you get back to work, because if you did the job well, the product is not yet done. Voltaire wrote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”191 Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that “real artists ship.”192 New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.

The hardest part of ship and iterate is to iterate. It’s easy to rally a team to ship a new product, but much harder to get them to stick around and do the hard work to make that product better.

Forgetting sunk costs is a tough lesson to heed, so in a ship-and-iterate model, leadership’s job must be to feed the winners and starve the losers, regardless of prior investment. Products that get better and gather momentum should be rewarded with more resources; products that stagnate should not.

As Eric wrote to Googlers in February 2006: “There should be a plan for a ‘wow’ feature reasonably soon after launch.”194 With this approach, users get accustomed to seeing products launch with a high-quality, if somewhat limited, set of functions that they know will expand rapidly after launch.

To innovate, you must learn to fail well. Learn from your mistakes: Any failed project should yield valuable technical, user, and market insights that can help inform the next effort. Morph ideas, don’t kill them:

As Larry says, if you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely.

Management’s job is not to mitigate risks or prevent failures, but to create an environment resilient enough to take on those risks and tolerate the inevitable missteps.

“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.

when achieving success requires “multiple miracles in a row”),199 it is probably time to call it a day.

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