Marissa Mayer is the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google. FastCompany recently published an article titled Marissa Mayer’s 9 Principles of Innovation detailing the strategies which have given the Internet’ innovation leader its edge. The following is a summary of the 9 principles:
(1) INNOVATION IS THE GOAL, NOT PERFECTION
Some programmers prefer to code for months or years on a project before launch so that they can release the perfect product. Google prefers the “launch early and launch often” strategy.”
Marissa says that she tells her developers, ‘The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants–and making it great.’ The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.”
(2) SEEK IDEAS FROM EVERY SOURCE
Google has a list of ideas where employees can vote and comment on ideas.
(3) ALLOWING TIME TO INNOVATE
Google allows developers to spend one day per week (20% of their time) working on any project they want to. This time for innovation has lead to many of Google’s successful new products and services, which Google owns, of course.
(4) MORPH A PROJECT INSTEAD OF KILLING IT
If the market is not responding to a product, instead of dropping it Google tries to modify the product into something that the market needs. This exercise becomes an exercise in innovation.
(5) HELP EMPLOYEES SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE WITH EACH OTHER
Each Monday employees write an email with a bullet list of 5-7 items that they did the previous week. Then the data is made available to the other employees in a format that makes it easy to find out who is working on certain projects. Google also shares massive amounts of data with their employees so that they know what is happening in the business and what is important.
(6) CREATE THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE
Instead of focusing on what makes the most money, Google focuses on what is going to be the best for the users. By putting the users first, though, the money usually follows.
(7) MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON DATA NOT POLITICS
Design often becomes a very political issue because different people have different opinions of which design elements they like better. Instead, Google performs large numbers of tests on different ideas and elements, and select those which prove to be the most effective, regardless of who likes them.
Marissa says, “We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things.”
(8) CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS
Marissa says that, “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there.’”
(9) HIRE BRILLIANT STAFF
Even though Google has a thousand times more employees than when Marissa started, she feels that “the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on [hasn’t changed]. It’s almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google.” Google is only hiring the best and the brightest, and because they have created that culture, they are able to recruit and retain those kinds of people.
Posted on March 27th, 2008 by Nathan Gwilliam
Filed under: Google, Innovation, e-Business
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