Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How I'd Change Google's Goal Setting Process

Google's internal management approach has sustained and scaled pretty impressively. Transparency, quantitative goalsetting, setting stretch targets -- these principles are as evident in 2013 as they were when I arrived in 2003. Underpinning it all are OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - the framework by which individuals, teams and the entire company is managed. Googler Don Dodge does a comprehensive job of documenting OKRs in an earlier blog post, but the basics are this: Each quarter individuals and teams document their objectives for the next 90 days and grade the goals they set 90 days earlier. In Q4 teams also set metagoals for the next year.

Nine years at Google meant 36 Quarterly OKRs and the correlating number of annual planning exercises. My role at YouTube had me often working through our OKRs with Larry and Sergey (one of those stressful exercises that in hindsight was amazing). I believe OKRs were originally recommended to L&S by Andy Grove of Intel John Doerr of KPCB, and I know OKRs have spread through tech companies, sometimes carried by Google alumnus themselves. OKRs are sensible, straight forward and on a planning cycle managers understand. And that's the problem.

In 2009 Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay called Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.  The post discusses how engineers need long periods of dedicated time to build and managers (or people whose work generally involves lots of meetings) can honor this by not scheduling interruptions in the middle of these periods. It's great - you should read it.

Manager time vs Maker time gave me a lens to not just evaluate day to day schedules, but the general cadence of how we plan and build at Google. We consider ourselves a company founded and driven by Makers (our engineers), but somehow we settled into a Manager planning rhythm, one which mimicked accounting cycles rather than how things actually get built.

"Quarterly goals?" Why are three months the right duration for building features, why not two months or four months? And there was the amusing "last week of quarter" push to try and ship all the features you'd committed to ~90 days earlier.

Even more confusing were annual goals. By Q4, it's pretty clear whether you're going to hit the annual goals, the high level targets meant to inspire a year of work, but because you haven't started next year's planning cycle, the team has no documented targets for what the next 12 months look like. (Obviously the best managers start with an evergreen vision and then break into planning cycles - this isn't about roadmapping within teams - but the Quarterly + Annual segmenting is still derived from financial planning, not hacking).

What would I recommend for tech companies instead of Quarterly + Calendar Year Annual? These three:

• One Month - "What are we building this month" is the key question. Team leads get together the morning of the Monday prior to month's end and document the next month's feature releases. This is a bottom up process which includes items shipped completely intra-month and component work of projects which are greater than 30 days long (if you can't break a complex project into at least 30 days goals, then it's too big). Four weeks, a few weekends. Enough time to get a lot done. You don't need to micromanage - for example, if the team spends two days per month bug fixing, just hold that time aside in your calculations, don't document the bugs you intend to fix.
• "N+12 Months" - "What will our product and business look like a year from now?" I like the idea of a rolling "one year out" vision, processing new learnings and opportunities. At any given time the entire organization can have a true north for where we want to be a year from now. It evolves, it learns, it doesn't tick down to zero but rather always looks out over the horizon.
• Minimal Quarterly/Annual KPIs - Recognizing that quarterly and annual goals are important for financial reporting, you should keep a very narrow grasp on what you actually want to measure - just key drivers of business - and set quarterly targets. There can be a reality check - do these quarterly targets get achieved given what we're building? 

For me, Monthly Goals combined with N+12 Goals create the right short-term Maker cadence with longer term vision. I never got the chance to try it at Google, but hope to find companies using this sort of planning cycle to see how it works for them.

Jason Shellen Remembers the Early Days of Blogger

New "Early Employees" interview - this one with Jason Shellen of Blogger.

“I know I’m not being paid and there isn’t any money in sight but I think Blogger’s going to be huge and I want to work with Ev on this thing.” 

Seeing the World Through Rose Colored Google Glasses: Wearables & the Digital Divide

As a Xoogler, Google shareholder and technology geek I couldn't be more excited about Google Glass. Confirmed to be released this year at a pricepoint under $1500, Glass will attempt to make digital wearables and augmented reality a mainstream phenomena. But its four figure pricetag will surely be out of reach for most citizens, turning the first year of live Glass videos feeds into a tv station for the 1% containing extreme sports, exotic locations, hipster brunches and electric car POVs.

Sure as production volume increases and component prices fall Glass (and similar digital wearables) will become more affordable, but in the meantime the gap between those who can afford v1 and those who wait for v5 (or vNever) creates a new type of pernicious digital divide.

1) 10,000 Hour Rule
Malcolm Gladwell popularized this theory that it takes 10,000 hours or practice to become an expert. Anyone who gets a headstart with Glass - whether developing for the platform or mastering it as a user - starts building this advantage.

2) Augmented Reality Favors the Connected
A world where object and person recognition creates an augmented reality in front of our eyes. The less deep and public your digital footprint, the less discoverable you are. If you're unknown to the system, you're unknown to wearer. Imagine a future where the homeless and the disconnected are symbolically invisible to you because Glass can't identify them. Do we leave ourselves open to a new type of subtle exclusion where because it's so powerful to have instant information on our friends, friends of friends, etc that anyone who falls outside of this transparent social network is not to be trusted? That is, today we see someone on the street and don't know their relationship to us. Once that becomes instantly digitally available, how do we react towards those who have no current connection to our social graph?

3) Big Data. Incomplete Data
If Glass owners don't represent a true cross-section of the population, Google will be getting incomplete data. The geographies, faces, voices, activities Glass records will be demographically narrow. As if the company had sent Google Maps cars to only wealthy neighborhoods.

As news leaked that Google has contacted Warby Parker about possibly designing Glass frames, I recalled Warby has a "Get a Pair, Give a Pair" program where they donate glasses to needy recipients for each pair purchased. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Google and Warby found a way to get Glass in the hands of engineering students, teachers, and lower income school districts from the start?

It's a tough question - one which is too easy to respond with statements like "the poor don't need smart glasses, they need food, shelter and jobs" or "just like smartphones are now owned by more than the 1%, technology and market forces move fast enough to create a level playing field." Instead, I'd love to see Google, and other manufacturers of digital wearables, recognize the issues and conceive of more aggressive and innovative ways to open new hardware technology to the broadest population possible.

Jason Kincaid Remembers TechCrunch's Early Days

My interview series with early employees continues: Jason Kincaid, reporter at TechCrunch.

"I don’t hold anything against Mike for selling. TechCrunch was his baby and he put everything he had into it"

Hiring Hack: You Should Send the Mail, Not the Recruiters

Important role open in your org. You think you IDed the perfect hire. Strong product manager at rival company known for her combination of tech talent and EQ. A great blogger with social media presence. A designer friend of yours has worked with her and vouches for her greatness. If you could get her over to your team, wow, it could be a gamechanger.

And then you let your recruiter send the introductory email. WRONG.

For any targeted hire - especially senior hires - you should always send the first email yourself. It's fine to cc: your recruiter for follow-up but for if you have any credibility, make initial contact directly.

Which of these are you more likely to respond to?

"Hi, my name is Alex and I'm a recruiter at BigCo. We've heard great things about you and want to tell you about our Director of Revenue role. Can we schedule a phone call?"

-or-

"Hi, my name is Steve and I'm the VP of Revenue at BigCo. I've heard great things about you and read your blog frequently. There's an open role on my team - Director of Revenue. I think you'd have a real impact over here. I've cc:ed our recruiter Alex. Can I ask him to follow-up to give you more information?" [Note - if it's a really high level position or urgent hire, skip recruiter and proceed right to a meeting with you]

I've ignored variations of the first one my whole career. The few times I received a variation on the latter, I always responded, even if just out of politeness. 

If you care, send the email yourself.

At Startups, It's Not About The Founders But About The Owners

In tech we love to celebrate the role of FOUNDER. There's a conference by that name. The increase in number of startups being formed isn't just about market opportunity or lower costs of initial technology but also a cultural norm which tells any enterprising college grad that it's not cool to work for someone else when you can start your own thing. And we stretch the term - what's a "founding team" anyway (I'm guilty of this having put myself on the "founding team" of Linden Lab which is an amorphous distinction that just means to convey 'I was there early')?

However when we throw around the term we forget that it creates second class citizens out of the rest of the company. They're merely employees, non-founders if you will. Culturally it's more effective for companies to create a strong shared sense of opportunity, commitment and urgency. That's why I believe we need to adopt a new term for ALL employees of startups: owners.

When you join a startup you're doing it because you want to bet on yourself and the rest of the team. That you can building something valuable which didn't exist before. Even with rising startup salaries the hope is that your equity will be the reward. Equity serves as an effective incentive because it is supposed to get you thinking about the company as a whole. You quite literally become a partial owner in the company.

Why then don't we use the term more broadly in the workplace? When I look at a startup's office, I don't see founders and employees. I see owners. I see people who work every day not for their individual gain but because the whole needs to be greater than the sum of its parts. 

Founders start the damn thing - no small feat. Founders hold the long roadmap, the vision, the true north, in their heads and hearts - essential whether it's year one or year 15 - just look at the impact Larry Page has had at Google. But the startups which stop thinking about founders vs nonfounders and focus on treating the entire team as owners are the ones which I suspect outperform over time.

Update 2/22: A few folks, including my friend Amit Patel (early Googler), remind me that if "ownership" just applies to owning stock options, well, it's pretty hollow definition. Absolutely, the culture needs to be one where the team can help direct the future of the company, make a real impact, understand the mission of the organization, etc. These are all aspects of a healthy company IMHO.

Started One Company, Seed Funded a $1b+ Startup, Now Mr. X Seeks Cofounder. Perhaps You?

Last week I woke up to an unexpected email with the subject "Cofounders?" My initial reaction classified it as a random "hey, join my company" - since publishing my address within my Google resignation note I'd received an eclectic set of messages (apparently, I'm big in India). But then I caught the sender's name. Whoa, him? He's a very smart guy - an engineer himself. One successful startup under his belt. Some angel investments including seed money into one of the "billion dollar company" club members. Let's call him "Founder X."

Quickly opened the email. No, he wasn't asking me to start something with him but rather for help finding a cofounder for his new venture. Here's the text:

Hi Hunter, we've met at [redacted] over the last couple of years.  I've always found your discussion comments to be insightful.  : )

I'm writing because I'm getting back into the game with another startup, and looking for a cofounder.

Do you know any technically deep people who want to start a company? [Note: Founder X is also an engineer]

Wow, that's pretty cool but at the same time strange. This guy - close to a superstar in my book (I just don’t know him well enough to fully anoint) - was asking me somewhat randomly to help him find a founder? Didn't he know everyone already? Was there something less-than-amicable about the separation from his last company? Had he exhausted his circle of friends? Was I being Catfished? :)

Somewhat confused, I requested more details but also fired a note off to Jessica Alter, CEO of FounderDating, an online network connecting entrepreneurs to start new projects and companies. Wanted to know in her experience (a) how often do people with broad personal networks reach beyond their circles to ID a cofounder and (b) isn't it really only first time founders or non-technical founders who have this problem?

Jessica's reply:

Do you mean do  accomplished entrepreneurs with strong networks need help finding cofounders? If so, the answer is an unequivocal yes!  Roughly, I'd say 30-40% of our members are repeat entrepreneurs. Many of your friends ;). We're invite-only so the majority of people have networks.  For example, almost every EIR in the Valley, early employees and founders from places like Stackmob, Gilt, Zynga and Google alumni is probably our biggest single feeder.  
Finding someone who has complimentary skill sets while having alignment on the type of company you want to build (culture, etc.), the general (product) area of focus, the vision and the timing is really, really difficult.  It's not as simple as having a network, obviously that helps but so many things have to line up and have chemistry.  And to be honest, often people who already know each other ignore some of the warning signs because they know each other and they believe that makes up for it.

Probably second biggest misconception is that finding cofounder is only an issue for first time entrepreneurs or people that aren't connected. Just not at all the case.

Interesting - while I believe the strongest cofounding relationships result from people who've worked together before, I can see why there's room for bringing together likeminded folks.

So back to Founder X, here's what he's willing to share publicly right now (there's obviously more that he will discuss person-to-person -- I've heard the idea and it's one of those things you know will exist but is hard to build).

Skillset is mostly information retrieval + community building.  A background in those things would be a plus but the must haves are someone (1) deeply technical, (2) wants to work full throttle, and (3) wants to be the CTO.  I'm open to various levels of experience, all the way down to someone just out of college.

Are you a match of Founder X? Email me hunterwalk@gmail.com -- you and I either need to know each other already, or you should have someone I know introduce us. In this case I can't just forward on messages from people I don't know. Your interest will be confidential. Trust me, this is a cool opportunity.

Armed with Jessica’s feedback, I asked Founder X why he was expanding beyond the people he’d worked with before. Here’s his reply - it’s an interesting peek inside the mind of a serial entrepreneur:

Experienced entrepreneurs see about 10 to 15 attributes that it's really important to have alignment on.  New entrepreneurs only see about four and everything else is a result of gut feel or randomness.

This calibration of what to look for makes experienced founders quicker to see important misalignments with close friends.  It also gives them the filtering power to parse through the much larger friends-of-friends candidate pool.  Both of these forces make it more likely that experienced entrepreneurs will be open to friend-of-a-friend cofounders.

(Just to gut-check this I made a quick list of some things to filter on, and came up with the following 16.)

• Timing re availability and when to start the company
• Working with any life circumstances (geography, significant other, etc)
• Who is CEO
• How hard to work
• Skills maturity alignment
• Alignment on what core competency you want to build a company around
• Complementary on optimism v.s. paranoia tendency
• Complementary on details v.s. big picture focus
• Preferences on enterprise v.s. consumer
• Aiming for big swing v.s. base hit
• Having basic functions covered: hiring, marketing, product design, eng, finance, management, etc
• Able to communicate well (similar mental primitives, compatible styles of disagreeing)
• Similar levels of commitment to the startup
• Able to share burdens / support each others' psychologies and stress levels
• Anything else that goes into trust
• Anything else that goes into how you feel about being in the room with the other person for 12 hours a day

So there you go. Let me know if you’re interested. I’m not getting anything out of this other than hopefully bringing two folks together to build something awesome.

"Data Magician PhD" looking for HELLS YEAH Job in Bay Area

Want a Data Magician? Sean Summers [LinkedIn, Blog, PhD work page incl contact info] is looking to move back from Zurich and interested in a gig. I actually don't know Sean but how we connected is a fun story. On Saturday I tweeted about a new 2013 goal of mine: get my friends from MEH jobs to HELLS YEAH gigs. Sean responded and we exchanged a few emails. Since I haven't work with him, I can't vouch for Sean, but I think it's cool he's willing to put himself out there like this. Here's some of his self-description:

Essentially, I'm a data magician with a conscience. Math, logic, and creativity (craziness) are my tools.

I am definitely open to a venture that would allow me 

- to support my family (unless my wife can take care of that, she's working on it :) )

- to return to San Francisco

- to work passionately on a project that I can't stop thinking about

- to be part of a smallish team that is attempting to build something incredible

- I grew up in California, I am a US citizen

- I got my BS in Aerospace Engineering from UCSD

- I worked on the GlobalHawk Unmanned Aircraft (control systems group) at Northrop

- I quit that job, moved to Barcelona, and bummed around Europe for 6 months on the $6000 I had saved up

- Got my MS from UCSD, decided I liked research and wanted to return to Europe

- I've been in Zurich 5 years and will defend my PhD Thesis next month

- 5 years may seem long, but I have enough material for 3 PhD dissertations in 3 different fields

- Lastly, yes, I know machine learning, I can apply the algorithms, I have the ability to understand all the mathematics behind the algorithms so I know when it's all BS. It's all just function approximation and optimisation anyways.

If anyone contacts Sean please let me know how it goes. Good luck!!!!

Guest Blogging Again. First Up, TechCrunch.

Excited that I'm able to start guest blogging again on my favorite sites (if they'll take me!) - first up, today at TechCrunch a post on why Eric Schmidt was right about people changing their identity in the future to avoid their past actions.

During my Google tenure I was guest posting various places but decided to stop because wanted to make sure my thoughts weren't misconstrued as explicit (or subtle) company positions. 

Thanks for reading!

Early employee interviews continue w RedHat

I've been doing series of interviews with early employees of notable tech companies. Latest one is Paul McNamara discussing his days at Red Hat.

"Red Hat went public on August 11, 1999. We priced at $14 per share and by the closing bell the shares were trading at $52 per share -- the 8 largest first day gain in the history of Wall Street at the time. By January the stock hit $296 per share and we split the stock 2 for 1. At this price, the company was valued at nearly $20 billion and my personal net worth exceeded the GDP of several small countries – at least on paper. Red Hat was trading at more than 475 times trailing revenue. To put this in perspective, at its height, Facebook traded at only 22 time trailing revenue."

More Google Execs Should Blog, Tweet, Share Online

I was one of the more prolific Google bloggers, even if PR & management sometimes didn't like it (and I did receive the occasional second hand admonishment from people above my pay grade). But instead of shying away from contributing to the share-osphere, my former Google colleagues should find their voices online. Why? Because if you're going to attract the best talent, it helps if they know who you are.

In my first years at Google we had no problem recruiting the most talented young product managers. Their friends were already working for us. The responsibility they were given was large. The opportunity for financial return significant. And the competitive space from 2004-07 was lacking solid alternatives. Then Facebook arrived. Then Y Combinator debuted. Then Web 2.0 accelerated. All of a sudden the most entrepreneurial talent wasn't deciding between Google and, um, Microsoft, but between Google, pre-IPO hotness and starting their own thing. No longer such a clear choice, especially when the ecosystem is encouraging everyone to be a founder.

But these were still the product managers I wanted to hire/acquire at YouTube, or encourage to transfer from the Mountain View Mothership. You know how people say that employees don't leave companies, they leave managers? Well I needed to try and make the inverse happen - give some sense of what working at YouTube could be like. There are multiple reasons why I blog - some very personal - but during my years at Google I was certainly trying to become credible to potential hires. To give them visibility of who I was and what I believed. To make my name recognizable enough that maybe they'd open an email from me. To put some weight behind the statement, "Look, work with me for a few years and if you want to start a company after, I'll help make the right introductions."

Did it work? Mixed. Mostly it was having a large enough set of friends that most people we were interviewing could reference me via someone they knew. But I do believe that every once in a while I'd write something interesting that at least got someone thinking, or even believing they might learn something from working with me.

Showing yourself beyond the corporate PR-sanctioned faces gives people the chance to like, or dislike, you before they're making the decision whether to show up for work everyday at your company. And I'd love to see more of my talented former colleagues sharing their thoughts with the broader tech community.

Tweet at The Movies

Movie theater multiplexes should turn one of their theaters into lights on, wifi flowing, tweeting encouraged experience.

What is Product Management?

What is Product Management? General Assembly asked me to answer that question, so i took my best stab on their blog.

Social Commerce: A Simple Definition

"WTF does 'social commerce' even mean" venture capitalist Brad Feld recently tweeted, with a pointer to its buzzword-dense wikipedia page. I guffawed as well, but then paused - what would a reasonable one-sentence definition of social commerce look like? Is there such as thing? Here's what I came up with:

Discovering a good or service via someone you know who does not directly financially benefit from the interaction.

Here's my unpacking --

"Discovering" - doesn't need to be a purchase, but rather a piece of information which may later result in purchase. This is lack of attribution is what drives social network platforms batty - they need to prove their value in the commerce landscape since users will often go to Google, Amazon or elsewhere and search for the item when they're ready to purchase, rather than click through in the moment on a link in Facebook, Twitter, etc (or a link might not have even been included, just a statement like "Banana Republic jeans are the bomb"). Discovering might also suggest that it needs to be the first time you've been provided the information. I don't mean it that way - you could, for example, encounter multiple people talking about Banana Republic jeans until finally you decide to make a purchase for yourself.

"good or service" - social commerce can be about jeans, a plumber, a vacation destination, etc.

"via someone you know" - I don't believe social commerce is merely hearing about a good or service via a social platform. If you don't know (where "know" can equal "follow" - ie symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships) the person but simply encountered an ad on Facebook, that's not social commerce, that's a marketing channel.

"who does not directly financially benefit" - there are plenty of great affiliate programs, multilevel marketing businesses and promotional offers. The spread of these in my mind are *not* social commerce. Instead, the entity sharing the information is not receiving any direct financial benefit. They might be associating themselves with the halo effect of a brand or otherwise feel as if they're being recognized or compensated in some form, but it's not with an immediate, quantifiable $$ payoff.

Does this make sense to you? Limited to one sentence, what would you change?

I'm Feeling Lucky: Leaving Google for New Adventures

Since folks have been speculating, yes, I recently left Google after 9+ years. It's an amazing place and I'm grateful for every day I spent there. Here's the email I shared w colleagues:

After nine years, two months it's time for me to figure out how to make lunch for myself. Yup, I'm leaving Google and it's my year-old daughter's fault. You see, when I look at her I think about the values my wife and I want to instill. Among the most important is the belief that you should pursue all your dreams, think big, lean into your fears and keep building. The best way for me to teach this is by example, so I need to step away from Google's comfort. No next adventure to announce yet - this is about feeling there's more for me to do, but also knowing I need some space to figure it out.

Google has changed my life. The chance to work with so many smart and creative people - thank you for letting me learn from you. There's no university in the world which could have supplied equal education. Because of my time at Google I truly look at the world in a different way, one of problems waiting to be solved rather than insurmountable obstacles or indelible truths.  I'm especially appreciative of Joan Braddi, Susan Wojcicki, Chad Hurley and Salar Kamangar - leaders who took me into their teams and, when it was time, encouraged me to find new challenges. Selfless, intelligent and loyal to Google.

While being inside of Google is special, passing through the membrane back into the outside world is also a unique time, one which affords me a few perspectives on being a Googler. Our best efforts come from desire to thrill our users, not from fear of competitors. Work hard and be uncompromising but treat one another with kindness. So many of our products have continued growth ahead and I'm especially excited to watch YouTube's accelerating evolution towards the first global livingroom.

Here's to truly hoping I have the chance to work again with all of you. If I can ever be of help, don't hesitate to reach out via hunterwalk@gmail.com or mobile.

It's probably only fitting that I leave you with a favorite video: http://youtu.be/DxwdskaRxcU

Warmly,
Hunter

Interview with Electronic Arts Employee #19

Over at LinkedIn, I interview Stewart Bonn, Electronic Arts employee #19.

"Game companies came in either of two flavors: producer driven or marketing driven."