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The Real Value of the Google 20%
There are a number of thoughts on the Google mandate that all developers spend 20% of their time on self-directed projects. Allow me to drop my own 3 cents into that fountain.
Consider any technology project at any medium to large sized company. 50% to 70% of the total project time is spent on planning and definition. Another 10 to 15% goes to QA.
So you’re looking at best case of 40%, worst case 15% of the project timeline being actual development time.
I’ve actually seen the 15% case on occassion. It is a truly ugly beast.
In the regular world a business or marketing person comes up with an idea, creates a big thick Marketing Requirements Document, hands it off to product folks, who create a lovelier, thicker Product Requirements Document, who hand it off to the architects, who copy and paste stuff around and attempt to convince people they’re doing something useful to finally arrive at … the Technical Requirements Document.
After much negotiation and back and forth on the features and what is doable, the doc is finally handed off to the code monkeys, who are now clearly behind the 8 ball because 60% of the project timeline is already eaten up. And we can’t short-change QA, because we are Committed to Quality. Indeed.
Somewhere around the 70-80% mark of the project timeline, we finally have something we can see. Ah, that’s what the product looks like. Wow, that’s an ugly wart there. And this feature that we decided not to do, boy, we really need that one. The product and business guys haven’t been sitting on their hands either; they have a list of stuff they’d like to creep in. Yup, we’re in good shape to make this schedule. If the project doesn’t get cancelled, now that people actually see what it’s all about.
In the Google world, you’ve got a bunch of smart overachievers with a mandate to be creative and come up with the next big thing, and company allocated time to do it in. There’s a great deal of competitive pressure, because that other guy in the next aisle is doing something neat and I still haven’t thought of anything…
So these guys go home and think about it. What should I do? And one day in the shower, the idea hits!
Point is, getting the idea costs the company nothing. This is a high quality idea from a high quality person, someone who might have gone off it do it at her own startup, but Google got it for free.
Now, the 60% to get at the TRD so we can get the monkeys revved up and… Oh wait, none of that. The guy with the idea is the monkey! And the monkey actually cares about the idea. It’s his idea. It’s his baby. Her baby. Politically correct genderless baby. Whatever. We just jumped ahead of the rest of the world by 60%!
But it’s not over yet. Monkey man (/woman/person) cranks thru and comes up with … a prototype. There it is. Now we can see it. We can touch it.
Fundamentally, it’s easier to make a decision about the value of an application when you can see it and touch it. It’s also a better informed decision that you make. Think about Google News. It wouldn’t be an exciting idea till you actually saw it in action. Would you have gotten excited about yet another news aggregator?
Ok, back to the prototype:
Boy, what a terrible idea! It reeks. We lost 20% of 1 techie’s productivity for X amount of time.
Boy, what a great idea! It’s a winner! We just jumped ahead 60% (ok, say 40%, because those wonderful product people do have to get involved eventually). That’s total project time. We jumped ahead of everybody else an obscene amount of time.
Remember, we’re doing this with every developer. Some percentage of the ideas are going to be winners. A bigger or smaller percentage than the Other World method where a business or marketing person comes up with the idea? I’d venture to say, given the right set of developers, it’ll be comparable or better. But it actually doesn’t have to be even close to as good for the whole thing to work. We’re running mini experiements all over the place with every developer. If 1 in 10 works, we’re still ahead of the game.
If you don’t like the numbers I used, use your own. Do your own mini calculation, and you’ll be suprised to find this still works. You just have to believe the monkeys are smart, that they care, that they’re capable, and give them time and facility to help you.
So, that’s my take. It’s all about short-cutting the product definition cycle, getting product out faster, going straight to working prototype, and making intelligent decisions about what to launch. It’s avoiding decision by committee. It’s a brilliant tool for accelerating value delivered to the company. It also keeps the monkeys happy and excited, but that’s a side benefit. These are all good things. If you have monkeys, you should try it.
This is about a culture change that has to take place in various companies, the current culture at most companies today is predominantly one of: “Sales people and management are assets as they brin in the money, all others within the company are costs that need to be reduced”. For 50 odd pluss years whole carreers of management people are based on reducing the costs of the company instead of making up new ideas to help the company to get further in time. The results of that are pretty much obvious as one can see how high profile companies like GM and Ford, so lean when it comes to the quality and room for it’s employees that most people feel bad at their workplace and because of that is only able to produce rotten products. Why should they care for getting the last buck in and why should they care about a smooth production flow if management only see them as pesky costs and underfund these parts of the company in yet another restructuring round.
It’s all about apathy created by arrogant management, when making cars and other goods it takes a while for the public to react on that and replace these goods for other brands, in the 80’s it was uncool to drive a Japanese car, now most people drive them and most people start to admit that American cars really drove crappy and unsafe. In software and services people will notice apathy with companies almost instantly because all lines between seller and buyer (I hate the word consumer, it’s a degrading term used to depict the stupid mass by arrogant managers) are shorter, often even seller and buyer team up to get the best service for the buyer. So good for Google that they do this, not only good but also essential for the long term survival of this company. But there is more, because the world is rapidly getting smaller, ethics of a company will get more important in the perception of the world. So decisions like Google made entering the chinese market will definite hurt their corporate face with the market resulting in being worth less on the longer term.
A License to Pursue Dreams: Google’s Innovation Equation…
I’m not sure if it’s because I was recently asked to
chair a panel on “driving innovative
thinking ……
at my company, one that just IPOd and double its share price in less than 2 months, QA takes more than 1/3 of the total release cycle time. moreover, i encourage 20% of a QA engineer’s time during the scheduled project to be devoted to side projects. but unlike google’s “do whatever the hell you feel like doing, because we’re a Great Place To Work”, i request that each project somehow benefit the company. beyond that, you’re on your own.
it’s worked out great. the entire engineering team uses a couple of our products, we’ve boosted automation and implemented ideal engineering practices that other companies dream of.
i’d like to make the point that google had the start of a good idea, but from what i hear from my google friends, they really need to control it a little better; people slack off during 20% time, or work on completely irrelevant projects.
oh, and spend more time testing!
[...] that Google, nutures their employees to do just that, and rewards them for doing so. The real value of 20% time is that Google gets ideas for free, and at the same time employees feel they can express their [...]