Grow, Baby, Grow

We continued to bulk up as we prepared for our CPC cage match with Overture. Even marketing was given the okay to add staff, and I suddenly found myself with seven open positions and hundreds of résumés cluttering my inbox. I had no time to read them. The AdWords Select launch ate up chunks of my day, and our new venture into hardware, the Google Search Appliance (GSA), chewed up the rest. Our distributed-computing toolbar nibbled at the edges not already gnawed by catalog search. I had canned responses to feed user support and ongoing scraps with Marissa and Wayne over the translation console. I carried the résumés with me and read them while mopping up the residue of my daughter's stomach flu and while waiting for my endodontist to redo a root canal that had gone painfully wrong.

Still, I got a note from a product manager complaining that I couldn't be too busy to rewrite something a second time because he hadn't seen me in the office at two a.m. I wrote a scathing reply in which I pointed out I had been at work till three a.m. polishing AdWords Select and that, well ... let's just say it went on for a page and a half of painful detail about his need for urgency and how it related to his management style.

I hit Send and waited for the response. It wasn't long in coming. "Don't send this," Cindy advised me, as I knew she would. I always ran venting tirades by her before sending them to the people who had wronged me. She understood my wrath and sent a curt note on my behalf. I had plenty of wrath to go around during those hectic days, when the smallest bumps threatened to upset my carefully balanced tray of tasks. My buffer, as the engineers sometimes said, was full.

With Google's expansion, the engineers found that they had outgrown the grand experiment begun with the awkward July reorg. In January 2002, Wayne announced that the company's flat structure could not scale much further. Yes, the executives had a clear line of communication to engineering, but Google intended to hire another hundred engineers that year. They couldn't all report to Wayne. The new goal would be to bring the reporting ratio down to thirty-five to one. Senior managers would be hired primarily for their technical skills, not their managerial ability. These new directors would recognize technical talent when they saw it and, when needed, could lend a hand rather than just encouragement.

A month later Jonathan Rosenberg, freed from his prior commitments by the bankruptcy of Excite@Home, joined Google as VP of product management. He formalized the responsibilities of the department Larry had started with Salar and defined the role of product manager. The PMs would work with engineering to design and develop new products and features, handle cross-organizational communication, and determine product road maps.

There would soon be many PMs, with many advanced degrees from the world's top business schools, law schools, and engineering programs. Our cultural evolution would take a giant leap from single-celled amoeba to vertebrate, from anarchy and individual autonomy to the controlled chaos that, at Google, was as close as anything came to a state of order.

Jonathan's new division shoehorned itself into a crack in the org chart between Cindy's corporate marketing group and engineering. When product management had been ad hoc, my colleagues and I had worked directly with engineers to prepare products for launching into the open market. Now PMs would formally coordinate that activity and draw on the PR specialists and brand management (that is, me) as they did on other corporate resources in their tool kit.

As the product-management wedge grew wider with the influx of new hires, resistance to being displaced intensified within Cindy's world. I, for one, was willing to be integrated, but I didn't want to be shoved aside. In a growing, engineering-driven organization, the power of product management could easily become an unstoppable force. Cindy's reports, including brand management, played a secondary role. We added the clear-coat finish on a precision automobile—our efforts invisible save for a glossy shine highlighting the beauty of the machine that lay beneath. My role still had value, because I worked on the language that went into the product itself. But thinking about how users perceived the product, and the company as a whole, was a low priority. The product would speak for itself, so what mattered most was the technology and the cool things that could be done with it.

The building's population density increased, even after we pushed finance and the ads team into an adjacent office, quickly dubbed the "MoneyPlex." Stacy in HR sent out multiple memos about office hygiene and our duty to respect the micro-kitchens, load our dirty dishes, put away the milk, throw out half-eaten bananas, recycle whenever possible, leave conference rooms clean, wash hockey gear, and keep animals out of the café, the kitchens, and the bathrooms. There were policies regulating dogs left alone, animal hair, and barking, barfing, and biting.

Charlie warned Larry, Sergey, and long-suffering facilities manager George Salah that he would expire without more space. A compromise was reached. A semitractor showed up one morning belching diesel and dragging a monstrous white trailer custom outfitted with ovens, dishwashers, pothooks, and prep counters. The leviathan was unhitched and beached in the parking lot adjacent to the café to bake in the sun like the victim of a drive-by harpooning.

The trailer contained a fully equipped mobile kitchen designed for use at large outdoor events. All it required was hookups to electricity and water. Those we had, though we lacked the permits that would have allowed us to use them legally. But what's a piece of paper compared with the happiness of hundreds of Google employees? Facilities plugged the trailer in and fired it up. With its painted sheet metal glinting in the harsh summer light and smoke pouring out of its vents, the "auxiliary kitchen" immediately lowered property values throughout the manicured office park in which Google was situated. All that was missing was a rusty Ford pickup on concrete blocks and an ugly mutt chained to a lawn chair. Charlie promptly had his crew run up the Jolly Roger on a pole jutting from the trailer's roof, proclaiming the auxiliary kitchen an interference-free zone. Charlie's outlaw kitchen crew operated unperturbed except for a lone fire truck that rolled up to investigate the smoke perfuming Mountain View with the aroma of a rib joint. Its crew left without citing us. Firemen. They do love barbeque.