Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Good Advice for Digital Agencies
Thursday, May 21, 2009View more presentations from Mike Arauz.
Yesterday, Ben Hedrington, tweeted a link to this great little interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. I liked it so much, I made this little slide-share deck to spread the good word.
A lot of what he said sounded like a perfect fit for the agency model I posted about last week. I think his advice is broadly applicable for all kinds of digital companies, and especially for companies who are trying to create things for the internet that people out there will actually use and appreciate.
My favorite two quotes are:
We really focus on what’s new, what’s exciting, and how can you win quickly with your new idea.
We say to the engineering management, “It doesn’t matter what I think of your product. What matters is whether you end up with users.” This is a vote. And there will be a vote. And you will either win or lose.
Google's development process is iterative, and focused on quick wins. And ultimately they put it to a vote – by the end users. They set their best ideas free into the wild, and let them either survive or die based on whether people actually find them to be useful.
I'd love to see more digital creative agencies act more like this.
1 Comments:
Call me a cynic, but this sounds like the Google from a couple years past, not the one that ex-Googlers like to piddle on these days. They seem to have grown into a sort of petrification; unable or unwilling to move very quickly or make sound but untested decisions.
Of course, this is the perspective from outside the fish bowl.
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