Google's bet on small

Google's bet
on small
.

Forbes has a nice
piece

on how Google takes advantage of small teams in a big organization to
actually get things done. For all those who say “this wouldn’t work
for us because we’re too big,” just have a look at one of the world’s
most successful companies.

Brin and Page have created a corporate organism that tackles most big
projects in small, tightly focused teams, setting them up in an
instant and breaking them down weeks later without remorse. “Their view
is
that there is much greater progress if you have many small teams going
out at once,” Schmidt says.

Hundreds
of projects go on at the
same time. Most teams throw out new software in six weeks or less and
look at how users respond hours later. With 82 million visitors and 2.3
billion

searches
in a month, Google can try a new user interface or some other wrinkle
on just 0.1% of its users and get massive feedback, letting it decide a
project’s fate in weeks.

And the money
shot:

A
typical task, from tweaking page designs to doing scientific research,
involves six people. Last month Google was reported to be in a bid to
derail Microsoft’s overtures to America Online by teaming up with
Microsoft’s  cable ally, Comcast, to invest in AOL; that this
didn’t leak earlier may have been because only a few Googlers were in
on it.

There’s one of the key benefits of small:
magnified accountability. When you have a group of 50 it’s easier to
dodge accountability and responsibility. But, when you can feed the
team
with one pizza it’s a lot tougher to hide (and that’s a good thing). [Signal vs. Noise]

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