08 March 2009

Keep teams small

Marissa Mayer: So if we double and we had 18 engineers, would we want them to do the three things twice as well? Or would we want to do twice as many things? And I said, “Well, obviously we’d want to do twice as many things.” And so you know that’s how we’ve grown. We’ve tried to keep the teams really small which leads to a sense of empowerment, people making decisions around what’s the best feature, what do their users need, how are they going to build the best product, and it allows also for them to be really agile. You know, we try and avoid meetings and like a lot of reasons when you have — one of the great things that happens with a small team is you can put them all in the same office. At Google we usually have three or four people in each office and that works really well because when they wanted to make a decision, people just roll back from their desk and say, “Hey –”

Michael Arrington, "Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search," TechCrunch, 6 Mar 2009, www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-future-of-google