Google

Background

Google is a multinational technology company that specializes in internet related services and products. These products include online advertising technology, cloud computing, search generation, hardware and software.  Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford. Google headquarters, nicknamed Googleplex, is located currently in Mountain View, California. According to Alexa, Google is the most visited website in the world. Google receives most of its revenue thru advertisement contracts with Fortune 100 clients. Google currently employees 72,053 people. According to Fortune.com it is voted number 1 company to work for in 2017. In 2015, Comscore reported that Google’s search market share was 63.9%. To date, Google has increased that percentage to 92.02% search market share which is almost the complete market. This is a reflection of it’s commitment to innovate and be the leader in the tech world.

Innovation

Input

At Google, “innovation” is not a mere principle to follow, but an unspoken rule. Google does not reinforce innovation with its employees because innovation is the foundation it is built upon. Google gives employees the flexibility and authorization to bring ideas to life and implement them in current production. In order to stay innovative Google hires the right people and gives them any resource they need to drive innovation, but also understands that they may fail. Google relies a lot upon data and data reveals a lot about the internal operations and efficiency. At Google, a large part of innovation is about efficiency. Working better internally. Small incremental changes are usually what drive innovation. “Innovation is Google and Google is change”.

 

Process

Innovation is about process innovation at Google. It is such a part of their culture the word is hardly mentioned. The pervading idea among workers at Google is that ‘if there is a better way, go do it’. Ideas that gain a following are then put into the production pipeline. Google follows the “Objective and Key Results”  (OKR) approach to project management. In this framework teams set a specific, quantifiable goal for the end of the year to ensure projects are completed. This helps balance main goal objectives and the freedom developers have to innovate and work on personal projects.

 

Output

Innovation is about process innovation at Google. It is such a part of their culture the word is hardly mentioned. The pervading idea among workers at Google is that ‘if there is a better way, go do it’. Ideas that gain a following are then put into the production pipeline.Small incremental changes actually change the way organization moves.

Google mentioned two main factors to measure success – but also had some underlying metrics that is crucial for each project. The two main factors are:

• Revenue
• Growth

The underlying metric which is important for all projects is each implementation needs be able to scale to millions of people. Therefore, revenue and growth have a strong focus, although all projects need to be scalable.

The growth metric is measured against a goal of growing 20% every year. The decision to exit a project if successful vs failed is mostly a democratic, majority decision for each responsible team. Although, the final decision is made by the project manager/product manager after analyzed against the measures for success.

Other factors that are involved in the measurement of success and if the project will continue are:

1. If the project means that Google is changing for the better
2. If the project brings value to the customers/users and stakeholders. In other words, if the product or service is making a client happy and brings value to its users and/or owners