jdilla.xyz

“The new always looks so puny — so unpromising — next to the reality of the massive, on-going business.” — Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

No matter how big the ambitions are for something, they always start small. But big companies have big expectations. This incongruence makes starting new things at companies particularly challenging.

Some types of these expectations:

• Big companies expect big results. If you’re a start up, a $1B market opportunity looks life changing; if you’re Apple, not so much. This creates a tension where interesting ideas that look small today don’t get funded unless someone is willing to promise big results. The incentive here is to overpromise because if you overpromise, you might get lucky and more or less hit expectations. But if you underpromise, you won’t get funded and you never even get started. So you overpromise because you have to, but overpromising creates pressure to generate results where the opportunities might not yet exist.

• Your teammates have expectations about their jobs. Your ability to define their your role is extremely important within larger companies. If you don’t define what you’re responsible for and what you’re not responsible for, you won’t get anything worthwhile done. But starting something new frequently requires small amounts of a specific types of skills. You don’t need someone to do full time content marketing or partner management, you just need someone to roll up their sleeves and work on a specific project. So on the internal start up, you run into a lot of people saying “that’s not my job” or “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this.” This is a particular challenge for less common functions where the model is to embed someone in the team (vs. project based or on demand staffing), because if you don’t have enough work to justify at least a quarter of a persons time for the foreseeable, you risk not getting anyone at all. This also shows up in small ways where people push back on owning specific projects almost reflexively — after all, in their last role at the same company this would’ve been someone else’s job and a major part of their success to date has been their ability to define their role.

• Performance assessment. Even if the people you’re working with are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed personally, the institution is going to push back against this. As companies get bigger, they develop career ladders. These ladders define the skills necessary to progress at a given level within a given function and inevitably describe what success looks like in the core business better than whatever new thing you’re working on. This will be a problem both for people on your project, who risk paying a penalty for doing work that isn’t at their level and people considering joining your project and comparing it against the career trajectory offered by other options.

So how do you succeed in spite of this? I can’t claim special expertise, but here’s what I’ve observed to work:

• Understand the incentives. If you understand it, you see it coming, and avoid the worst of it. Some of it you can mitigate with planning and some of it you just have to accept. This is the tax you pay in exchange for not having to build something new while chasing funding and setting up IT systems.

• Reward effort. The people you’re working with are multifaceted. Most people, particularly those in high demand professions, aren’t optimizing purely for the next promotion or personal prestige. If you’re excited about them going outside of expectations to do what’s best for the team, they’re more likely to keep doing it, even in the face of incentives to do otherwise.

• Create a safe haven for experimentation. Progress on new things isn’t linear and people need the space to mistakes. It’s much easier to do this without needing to create the artifice of consistent results. So make that space where you can. If you’re more junior, this might look like a side project outside of your formal OKRs. As you get more senior, give your people the space to dabble around in areas that have the potential to be productive without demanding that they show results.

• Even better, have a plan to create the artifice of consistent results. Teams and leaders that are really cooking are actively experimenting with one part of their portfolio while banking results with another part of their portfolio. By doing this, they’re able to shield the experiments from the need to produce results right away and can use the lessons they’ve learned to drive the next set of results.

From Bloomberg:

A full 50% of office visits globally were just once a week in the second quarter, up from 44% in the first quarter, according to data from Basking.io, a workplace-occupancy analytics company. At the same time, fewer people made the commute four to five days a week, especially in large cities.

I’m surprised that the norm here is 1 day a week. Right now I assume that most people live close enough to an office to make this work and are basically coming into the office to have all their 1/1s in person.

I think the longer term equilibrium for jobs that can be remote is going to be ~1 week per quarter mandatory in person together with the rest distributed. I do think that some people will choose to go in more often, especially if there is a critical mass of people that live nearby.

We’ll see!

I appreciated this observation from Austin Vernon’s post on the potential for Geothermal energy: When it comes to low information environments, just trying stuff is powerful. Only the simplest models are worth using.

He gives this example from fracking and low quality sand:

Models that predict frac (sic) job performance have consistently lost to some engineer saying forget it and upping how much sand and water gets pumped downhole. Besides failing to predict the success of slickwater, models didn't account for the success of low-quality sand. Until recently, the industry used only the most spherical sand at great expense. Theoretically, spherical sand should drastically improve permeability over wonky sand. Sourcing this sand from places like Wisconsin became a problem once oil companies started using trains worth of sand in a single well. Eventually, companies sourced local, low-quality sand at a much lower cost and rarely saw performance decreases. They bought more sand on the same budget and made better wells. Each formation eventually reaches a limit where further intensification doesn't help. The industry always finds that point empirically.

This reminds me of a theme from one of my favorite books, Range: when planning a career, there’s not a great way to know in advance what is going to fit for you, so experiment — have hobbies, change jobs, take on projects.

I think people typically misunderstand Google in two key ways that then causes them to misjudge it:

Google isn’t a start up. It is one of the largest companies in the world, with more than 150,00 employees and about as many contractors. Its peer companies, in terms of number of people, are General Motors, Darden Restaurants, and Aeon, to name a few. Just to try and put this into context, my entire current company (Stripe) is smaller than my product area at Google (YouTube).

Because many people still remember Google as a younger, smaller company, they judge Google’s agility against much younger and smaller companies instead of against its peer set. Certainly it’s less agile than it once was, but on a size adjusted basis it’s one of the most agile companies in the world.

Google is much more decentralized than a typical company. I joke that the best way to think about Google is a university attached to a money printing machine. Like a university, Google has many different departments that really aren’t trying to coordinate with each other. This is by design. You may not agree that this is the right strategy, but I think you have to understand it to effectively evaluate the company.

So what does Google get right? Here are four things that come immediately to mind for me.

• Product focus: an incredible amount of attention is paid at all levels of the company to the specifics of the product — what it actually does for the user. As a typical YouTube product manager, I regularly had to review product details with head of product, head of engineering, and other very senior leaders. These leaders, several levels up from me, were more well versed in the specifics of my product area than my manager or my head of product was at much smaller companies. This product focus isn’t top down, but cultural, which makes it much more powerful. People at Google encourage other people at Google to use their products and have opinions about how they should work.

• Distributed decision making: For me, this is where the misunderstandings about Google begin to really show up. Google is incredibly effective at decision making for a company of its size. An incredible amount of relatively high stakes decisions can be made at Google very quickly. As an example, if my team made a product change that positively impacted our key metrics, I could have that launched globally to billions of people in two 15 minute meetings.
  
  Additionally, Amazon gets a lot of mileage out of the Bezos API mandate, but it’s pretty common at Google as well to have some internal help text and an API be all that is needed for different orgs to collaborate. Additionally, as long as team incentives are aligned, it’s pretty easy for individual teams in different orgs to collaborate without any formal sign off from their Product Area Leads.
  
  Where things do get complicated at Google is major collaborations across product areas where there is a lot of ambiguity. So for instance, if I wanted to get a couple of teams from Google Maps and a couple of teams from YouTube to collaborate on a set of features with high but uncertain potential, I knew that this was going to be a difficult and challenging path. And yet, as difficult and challenging as this would be, on a per person basis, it was much easier to get collaborations like this to happen than at <1,000 employee companies that I’ve worked at.

• Talent friendliness and talent development. The slides and free lunches are really easy to make fun of, but Google legitimately tries to be a good place to work. The default policies are sensible and friendly to employees. When they make a change, they try to make sure to not punish their people along the way. It isn’t perfect, but especially for its size it’s really good.
  
  Beyond its policies, Google is a great place to develop your career if you’re thoughtful about it. As long as you’re keeping up with your day-to-day work, you can get exposure to almost any career path as a twenty percenter (once again, think of a university rather than a traditional company). Here the breadth of Google’s product offerings is a real asset; you can get exposure to almost any discipline or industry without changing companies.

Caveats: I worked at Google for about two and a half years, entirely at YouTube and mostly in the Zürich office. Google is a big place that varies a lot by team, so it’s entirely possible that my experience is an outlier. There are also many legitimate criticisms of the company that I’m not the best person to articulate.

Notes: 1: Alphabet