Shishir Mehrotra: commitment

Transcript context

…Spotify plug. All your platforms that you've worked on now can plug my videos. That's right. So I'll talk through this diagram that has two axes scope, this acronym, PSHE, and this line. So I'll stop sharing and describe it and we can come back to it. But I'll tell a little bit of this technique sort of changed how I think about evaluating not only product talent, but it actually turns out you can use the same set of rules for evaluating basically every role. But I'll tell it from how you asked it about product talent. So 2011, Larry Page took over at Google and he made a bunch of changes to the company, mostly quite positive. And one of the ones he did was he moved us from being a functional organization to being a business unit organization. We call them product units, but roughly the same thing. And there were eight product units set at Google, YouTube and Search and Ads and Chrome and Maps and so on. And that's very positive. It's hard to believe that we were already like 20,000 people were still functional, like all of engineering, all the products on reported into the CEO just seems like totally crazy with the breadth of products that we covered. One of the downsides of it was, like in any functional to business unit switch, as you lose some of that what does the function mean. And in particular things like what is a good product manager was a question we were at risk of losing. So at the time I was running product for YouTube, the group of the eight product leaders around the company got together and said, "Hey, we need to keep some level of consistency amongst how we think about what's a great product manager or it's all going to diverge and it's not going to mean anything anymore. " Actually, as a fun aside, we did a ritual that I've repeated a few times, but it isn't done often enough is, we said, "So who's going to drive this process?" And we did it in an election. I don't know why we do elections in the public world, but not in the private world, but it's actually quite effective. We used to do them on YouTube where we would elect into certain roles and you got a one-year term, you gave a little speech you like [inaudible 01:06:08]. We did an election. Anyway, so I got chosen to be the first sort of leader of this challenge, keeping the product management function together at Google. And the most obvious job we had to do was come up with a speech for the Calibration Committee. So Google does calibration a little bit different or promotion a little bit different than most companies. Most companies your boss decides you get promoted or not. At Google, there's a committee that decides, and it's supposed to be a committee that doesn't actually work directly with the person, so it can be a little unbiased and so on. And it gets done. The ritual was to do it in a hotel near the airport here in San Francisco and everybody get in these different rooms. And there was always a speech given at the beginning that used to be given by Jonathan Rosenberg who ran product for Google for many years. in San Francisco and everybody get in these different rooms. And there was always a speech given at the beginning that used to be given by Jonathan Rosenberg who ran product for Google for many years. And now it had to be given by somebody. So I'm going to give this speech, now I've got to figure out what the hell am I going to say, what's a good product manager. And as I was going through this, I decided to run this little exercise. So this group of eight product leaders, we took the level guides, we had a level guide for product managers, every company does, and we took it, we printed out a sheet of paper, cut it into little slices, one per level, and we cut off the title and the number and I handed them out and I said, "Can you reverse identify what level you're holding?" Then turns out nobody could do it. And it's not easy to do. The level guide had been kind of added to over time and not really that refined. And so it's full of all sorts of things that were whatever at that time was the priority of the team, they stuck it in a level guide. And so it would say things like, this person can manage a medium-sized project and they interview at least three people a week and they always send the notes out on time and their expense reports are always filed. And it'd be like, oh, that's a director. And it's just whatever we were trying to incent was sort of stuck in this thing. But we noticed that if you took all these sheets of paper and laid them out side by side, you could order them by exactly one statement, which was one that corresponded to scope. And so there's some word in there that was an escalating adjective that mostly correlated to how big is the thing you run. And so we decided, okay, well we're going to standardize. We're just going to focus on making that clear. And so we said we're going to define scope and so that we all use it the same way. And we came up with some stopping points and basically said, you own a feature, you own a group of features, you own a sub area of a product. You own multiple sub areas of product, you own an entire product, or you own multiple products, you own a product line. And that's going to be how we think about scope, go forth and evaluate your teams. We had the next meeting a couple weeks later and everybody comes back upset. It's like, this didn't work at all. Why? What happened? And said, "Well, the search team is super mad at the ads team because search is one product, the entire thing is one product. The ads team, they went and invented all these products, because it's like every little thing. ... the ads team, they went and invented all these products, because it's like every little thing you do in the ads platform has a SKU, has a P&L, has a... Because you have lots of products, so [inaudible 01:09:11] worked. The second issue was they said the scope is actually an input, not an output. We're talking to our manager and said, "Well, this person should get promoted. They've managed this huge scope." And then they would say, "But you gave them that scope. We should be judging you, not the person. How do we judge what they're doing with the scope?" It's actually very different.…

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