Case studies from the Google trenches
Case Study 1 - Project backlog improvement
- Backlog expanding beyond capacity
- Projects not getting done Lack of motivation reorg causing confusion
- Improve project throughput
- Push back on impossible projects
- Increase stakeholder satisfaction
- Establish a process and framework for evaluating incoming projects
- Publish project criteria and standards for requirements, notes, agenda, cadence, comms, culture
- Implement transparency in project assignment
- Higher levels of stakeholder satisfaction as measured by qualitative surveys
- Higher levels of PM satisfaction as measured by quarterly feedback
- Higher percentage of projects delivered on time
Case Study 2 - External partner integration
- Complex and sensitive project involving sending private data to 3rd party
- Mismatch between executive priority and engineer motivation
- Execute the project
- Maintain balance between user privacy, system security, strategic interest
- Establish tracking matrix and stakeholder meeting cadence
- Follow up offline and consistently communicate status
- Obtained legal sign offs and agreements
- Successful launch
Case Study 3 - Multi-year new hardware and software platform implementation
- Distant teams not cooperating
- Internal political issue (who owns the customer)
- Critical external deadline
- Establish integration model Launch by deadline
- Drove political decision by moving forward with technical implementation
- Established XFN meeting and high-level comms
- Direct relationships with multiple directors and problem stakeholders
- Decisions made
- Project launched on time
Case Study 4 - [Country #1, 2] terms of service project
- Politically sensitive project
- Project 2 years behind schedule
- Sales team v. legal team
- Roll out new terms of service for [Sensitive country #1, 2] advertisers
- Neutral stance in the face of internal business conflict
- Weekly meetings with engineers, PMs, legal team, and regulators
- Weekly updates to senior leadership
- Successful roll out
- Preserve ~90% of revenue while satisfying legal requirements
Case Study 5 - Multi-year data integrity initiative
- Prices in data were not accurate
- Hard to get partners to follow standard
- Lots of long-tail partners, no high-touch support
- Improve price accuracy
- Simplify partner engineering operations
- Define a new integration standard
- Establish a small set of trusted 3rd parties to provide high touch support
- Prefer integration pipeline to 3rd party vendors
- ~20% improvement in 18 months
- $200M of revenue, 50 million users