How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows

Rule Number Four: Great People Can Manage Themselves

Google spends more time on hiring than on anything else. It knows this because, like any bunch of obsessive engineers, it keeps track. It says that it gets 1,500 résumés a day from wanna-be Googlers. Between screening, interviewing, and assessing, it invested 87 Google people-hours in each of the 300 or so people that it hired in 2002.

Google hires two sorts of engineers, both aimed at encouraging the art of fast failure. First, it looks for young risk takers. "We look for smart," says Wayne Rosing, who heads Google's engineering ranks. "Smart as in, do they do something weird outside of work, something off the beaten path? That translates into people who have no fear of trying difficult projects and going outside the bounds of what they know."

But Google also hires stars, PhDs from top computer-science programs and research labs. "It has continually managed to hire 90% of the best search-engine people in the world," says Brian Davison, a Lehigh University assistant professor and a top search expert himself. The PhDs are Google's id. They are the people who know enough to shoot holes in ideas before they go too far -- to make the failures happen faster.

The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution. When Rosing started at Google in 2001, "we had management in engineering. And the structure was tending to tell people, No, you can't do that." So Google got rid of the managers. Now most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something isn't right, even if it's in a product that has already gone public, teams fix it without asking anyone.

"For a while," Rosing says, "I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit in people's heads: You are the boss. Don't wait to take the hill. Don't wait to be managed."

And if you fail, fine. On to the next idea. "There's faith here in the ability of smart, well-motivated people to do the right thing," Rosing says. "Anything that gets in the way of that is evil."

Rule Number Five: If Users Come, So Will the Money

Google has no strategic-planning department. CEO Eric Schmidt hasn't decreed which technologies his engineers should dabble in or which products they must deliver. Innovation at Google is as democratic as the search technology itself. The more popular an idea, the more traction it wins, and the better its chances.

Here's how one Google service came into the world. In December 2001, researcher Krishna Bharat posted an internal email inviting Googlers to check out his first crack at a dynamic news service. Although Google offered a basic headline service at the time, news was not a corporate mandate. This was simply Bharat's idea. As a respected PhD hired away from Compaq and a member of the company's 10-person research lab, coming up with new ideas is basically Bharat's job.

For an early prototype, it was quite a piece of work. Bharat had built an engine that crawled 20 news sources once an hour, automatically delivering the most recent stories on in-demand topics -- something like a virtual wire editor. And within Google, it got a lot of attention. Importantly, it attracted the attention of Marissa Mayer, a young engineer turned project manager.

Mayer connected Bharat with an engineering team. And within a month and a half, Google had posted on its public site a beefed-up version of the text-based demo, which is now called Google News and which features 155 sources and a search function. Within three weeks of going public, the service was getting 70,000 users a day.

One reason Google puts its innovations on public display is to identify failures quickly. Another reason is to find winners. For Bharat and Mayer, those 70,000 users provided ammunition to build a case for News within Google. "A public trial helps you go fast," Mayer says. "If it works, it builds internal passion and fervor. It gets people thinking about the problem."

Soon, Mayer had marshaled a handful of engineers to bulk up News. They expanded its reach to more than 4,000 sources, updated continuously instead of hourly. They created an engine that was robust enough to support five times the anticipated early volume. And they prettied it up, designing an interface that displayed hundreds of headlines and photos but that was still easy to navigate. By September, the new News was up.

Is Google News an actual product? Not exactly. Its home page is still labeled Beta, as are all but a few of Google's offerings. It may become a Google fixture, it may disappear, or it may recede into Google Labs. Mayer is still studying the traffic, and the engineers are still tweaking, reacting to users' emails.