Mark Geller

It has been almost a year since I left Google, yet I am struck how often I refer to lessons I learned there as I make daily decisions for KlickFu. I thought it might be helpful to summarize some of the most important things I learned at Google, some of which may be fairly obvious, and some may be less so.

1. Speed is the most important feature of any product. This is true for any tech product, and especially true for web services. You may believe users are going to love the new bells and whistles you are designing for your product. However, if they are going to slow it down, even as little as a few milliseconds (!)–or make the product feel slower in actual use even if it is not slower–you probably should not add the feature. In fact, if there are 2 or 3 (or 6 or 8 ) features you can remove from your product today to make it significantly faster (again, removing tenths of seconds), you should probably remove them or redesign them. It is well-known at Google when the founders are looking at a new product, they will sometimes count as a page loads, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand…” If they get to 3, you’ve probably got a problem. Also, to this day, Google posts the search time next to the number of results (upper right corner of the page) for every query.

2. If you can’t measure it and scale it, don’t launch it. If you are building a product for a large number of users, you have to design the product from the beginning to work–and work fast!–for a large number of users. This does not necessarily mean on day 1 you have to handle terabytes of data, however, as the product is being designed, you must anticipate, how does this product work when we have 1 million users, 50 million users, 500 million users–if you design it well, you might! The same goes for measurability, if you cannot measure the usage of your product or feature, you will have no way of knowing whether users like it, or if they do, how to improve it. Build the measurement–and the dashboard!–into the product from launch.

3. Innovate in every aspect of your company. Many companies believe innovation is something that happens with engineers, UI, and product people and the rest of the company exists to support and/or sell their creations. Google realizes every aspect of the company can and should be constantly considered for ways to improve or do things differently to benefit users, employees, partners, the environment, the world, and investors. Not only does this continuously improve the company, it creates an atmosphere of innovation in which employees in every area are constantly coming up with new ideas for their departments as well as the products. A few examples of Google innovations outside product teams include the company’s recent use of eco-friendly Bloom Energy generators; the Google stock option after-market, where employees can sell un-exercised options as options (rather than having to exercise the option), realizing far greater gain; and simple things like placing publicly available umbrellas next to doors of most buildings.

4. The right answer is the right answer, regardless of whether anyone else has done it that way before. Often there is pressure, overt or unconscious, to do something a certain way simply because that is the way it has always been done. Google places a high-value on truly considering all options, and taking the course of action that is most beneficial for users and the company even if it might seem strange at first. A great example of this is the Google IPO, in which the company chose to use a Dutch auction format for selling its shares over the strenuous objections of investment bankers involved with the deal. Although this format was highly unconventional, it ended up netting several hundred million dollars more capital for the company. Google makes these types of decisions every day in smaller ways throughout the company. How can you outperform your competitors if you do everything the same way they do?

5. Google cares deeply about user privacy. Google’s approach to privacy is often the subject of discussion and debate, especially recently with the launch of Google Buzz. From experience, I can say Google the company as well as employees care deeply about protecting user privacy. Googlers know their business is based entirely on user trust and they themselves are strongly driven to make the web a useful, safe place for users. No company is perfect, however, if you had to choose a large company to possess as well as safeguard a lot of valuable user data, in my opinion, you could not ask for a better company than Google.

6 Even smart people make mistakes. Google has a lot of really smart people… and some that are really, really smart. Overwhelmingly, these people work hard to create products that make the world a better, easier, faster, more economically-efficient place. However, even smart people screw up sometimes–make products people don’t want or that are confusing, annoying, or sometimes even a bit scary (e.g., Buzz, Street View). No worries, when this happens, the main thing is to acknowledge the issue, apologize, and most importantly, fix it asap. Whatever you thought about the recent Buzz launch, the speed with which Google acknowledged and fixed the issues was excellent and impressive. If you have good intentions and fix issues quickly, users can be quite forgiving.

7. Increase resources on new projects based on user response. Through 20% time and other methods, Google encourages employees to constantly create new features and products they believe users want. They do this with essentially zero approval required other than simple sign-off from a manager. By minimizing the initial investment, the company can enable developers to pursue new products quickly, identify the ones users respond to, and increase investment in those.

8. You can maximize internal transparency without leaking secrets publicly. For a large company at the forefront of its industry, Google is remarkably transparent internally, yet quite good at not sharing secrets publicly. For example, each quarter, after Eric Schmidt gives his presentation to the company’s board of directors, he gives the same presentation to all the full-time employees. This is something I have never seen in a company of 30 people, let alone 20,000. Yet, the employees understand that in order to receive this level of transparency, they have to be especially good about not sharing secrets. For example, as far as I saw, there were zero leaks about the launches of Google Wave as well as Buzz, even though thousands of Googlers were using these systems internally for months before they went public.

9. Doing what’s best for users is always the right answer. Always. Of all the nice things about working at Google as a product manager, the best–by far–in my opinion is that the main driver of every decision about the product and the business is, “What is the best thing for users?” Google realizes that with their core search business, they are always one click away from losing their entire user base. Yet, their response is not to try to lock in users by holding data hostage or creating proprietary partnerships with other powerful players–instead they focus on creating the fastest, most useful services so users will want to stay. In my opinion, Google’s approach in this way has been a main factor in influencing the entire culture of the Web to put users first.

10. Even large companies can be well-managed. Managing a large organization (i.e., over 1,000 people) has many inherent challenges. With all the stereotypes of corporate life, it is easy to believe that once a company reaches a certain size, it simply cannot be managed in a way that is efficient and flexible for employees. Through innovation and scalable processes, Google shows it is possible to run a large organization and still produce outstanding results in an environment that is responsive to employees as well as customers. I believe this model can be quite useful for government as well, and I am optimistic that the Obama administration is looking to apply many of the techniques from Google and similarly well-run companies to the U.S. government.