|
Focus on authentic strengths
 Feature
Particularly during tough times, a company’s ability to survive requires knowing what its core values are and then focusing relentlessly on building the business around them. At search giant Google, whose profusion of new products has been the awe of American industry, economic contraction has prompted the company to sharpen its focus on projects that match its core strengths. Google New Business Development Manager Robert Meese explains.
|
|
|
|
By Peter Longini
Not long after Google’s founding in 1998 – well before it grew to become a common verb denoting online information search – the U.S. economy fell into recession. As a result, the startup learned to be very focused, using its modest early resources to support one central idea: that there was an alternative to the human-generated directories which were then being used for popular Internet searches. It was this: in academia, the frequency of a scholarly paper’s cross-reference in other documents provides the strongest signal of its relevance to a given topic. It was an insight that the company’s founders learned to engineer into the heart of their hugely powerful search engine.
Over time, the economy eased and Google prospered, allowing it to expand into a wide variety of product spaces where it typically operated at a very high level. But now that the economic pendulum has returned to an even deeper recession, the company’s early lessons are once again being applied. Chief among them is having an unambiguous understanding of what Google’s essential strengths really are.
“Google’s founders have said ‘scarcity brings clarity,’” Robert Meese of Google’s New Business Development group in Mountain View, California observed. “The biggest change with the current environment is that the company is focusing on a smaller number of more significant products. It’s a healthy process for us to step back a little bit and take account of the various initiatives that have been going on.”
The Google Spin
So exactly what is it that the company looks for in a product idea when it takes that step back? “The company really values working on products and in markets where Google can do something very different,” he said. “Google’s not interested in releasing me-too products.”
That’s not to say everything Google does is completely new. But there’s always a distinctive Google spin to it. “Gmail, the email service, is a good example,” Meese pointed out. “Google took a core strength of the existing business – search – and applied it to email, providing a much more intuitive way to find things.
“Storage was something else really different; email at the time had a very limited amount of storage where you’re constantly deleting things,” he said. “The concept with Gmail was that you would never need to delete your email again. So it was taking the advantages that the company had built up around its search and storage infrastructure, applying them to another market, and allowing the company to do something very different than what had previously been done for those products.
Testing, Testing
They also look for things that can be done quickly and which lend themselves to real-time, real-world testing. “Speed is very important,” Meese pointed out. “If we’re able to do quick tests that don’t require as much time or investment, that would be attractive. There’s definitely a bias towards the pace at which innovation can occur.
“Testing is also a big part of the company culture,” he said. “There’s a great ability to run tests side-by-side, showing different users different things, and seeing what the actual response is. We’re able to show progress quickly and progress measured a number of different ways; it doesn’t necessarily need to be revenue-focused.”
But perhaps more than anything else, the most important measure is acceptance. “If you had to boil it down to one metric, it would be something that gets usage,” he said. “Products that are initially popular tend to stay popular; products on a low growth curve tend to stay on a low-growth curve.”
The Bottom Line
Of course in any business, revenue is the lifeblood. But it’s not the only thing Google considers in deciding whether to advance a new product idea. “It’s something that needs to be considered,” he admits. “But it’s only one of a handful of criteria for decision-making.”
Then again, there’s the company’s unconventional history. Its home page is probably the most austere of any major company in America. Most of its products are free. Its very public commitment to social and environmental progress is as unusual as is its philosophical allegiance to openness in Internet and telephone technology. And so, by the way, is its stellar stock value.
“When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first developed this index of the web, they didn’t know how they were going to monetize it,” Meese recalled. “But the insight for the company is that they focus mainly on users and usage. So it’s first doing something that people will like and use, and then making the decision of how do you build a business model on top of that.”
Selective Listening
To help figure out what people are going to like, many companies look to the voice of the customer for insight and guidance in developing or improving their products. But at Google, they hedge a bit. “Those approaches can be valuable,” Meese acknowledged, “but they lead you to toward the problems that the user has already identified. You’re not able to address problems that users don’t know they have.”
The company is also a bit more selective in which customers it listens to, paying much more attention to early adopters and power users, who are typically willing to spend more time, tinker more, and put up with uglier interfaces as products work themselves into the mainstream. It also pays close attention to its own 20,000 member workforce. “Even before figuring out the business model, the first thing is testing products internally. If we have a new product and people really like using it within the company, that’s a really good sign,” he said.
“Google also places a higher value on engineering. Product managers here tend to be more technical than in most other companies,” he pointed out. “So part of the decision process for new products is internally driven, based on technical feasibility more than other inputs to the process.”
The Inward Search
For many companies of Google’s size, sustaining the innovation that built the company in the first place can be a real challenge; it certainly doesn’t happen automatically. Even in a company with Google’s culture of innovation, there are deliberate processes that have been put in place to assure that it continues. “We do that a couple of ways,” Meese said. “One is through transparency inside the company. We have regular meetings where we discuss new products – those that have recently been released and even those that are upcoming and are not yet in the market.
Another is through 20-percent time, where engineers have the flexibility to pursue any projects of their liking. “The concept is that the company is run bottoms-up. Rather than having a formal hierarchy, the company values having everybody take ownership and having the ability to spend some percentage of their time doing something other than what their job title specifies. Gmail was created that way. Adsense was created that way, too. It enables engineers, if they have an interesting idea, to just do it and see what happens.
“And we use a lot of our own products,” he noted. “I can see everybody’s calendar in the company, for example, and we share a lot of documents. As you can imagine, search is also applied inwardly at Google and there’s a lot of information available internally to employees. It helps counteract the issues that you have with a larger company.”
|
|
|
About the Author
Peter Longini is the Managing Editor
for Inside Product Strategy™.
He can be reached at:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Subscribe to Inside Product Strategy ™
To read our latest articles click here.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Join Today.
Login.
Linked
Digg This
Email Page
Print Page
