Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

You know exactly what is necessary in order for your company to achieve Web Analytics 2.0 greatness. You attend a conference and hear all the speakers share deep insights - that ends up depressing you rather than exciting you.

At the end of one of my speaking engagements you come up and say “Thanks Avinash, that was really great, you’ve opened our eyes. But.“

I know that’s coming next. . . .

“Our Senior Management won’t let us do that.”

Or “We have been banging out heads on this one for six years.”

Or “I proposed testing / surveys / competitive intelligence / Analysts but I was shot down.”

Or sometimes “My manager simply does not get it / Analytics / Web / Me / Anything.”

Or one of many such variations.

Bottom line: It is not my fault, it is their fault.

Since I don’t want to upset my loyal readers I’ll agree that it is really not Us. It is just that we are too low on the totem pole or that our management is ignorant / opinionated / close minded / other things. We have tried but failed. We are great, sadly they would not know greatness if it hit them smack on the face.

(There, there. . . feel better? I am on your side! :)

So what do you do to move the ball forward? Certainly not buckle in and put in another five years on the job doing mediocre things and adding no value (you would never do that!).

Here is what you do: Embarrass your management!

Yes that does sound like career suicide. But stick with me.

Most of the time I have observed that we try to bring about change by trying to argue with our Management. Or we are insulted that they won’t accept our recommendations, after all we are the experts here and that’s why they hired us!!

Often no amount of our own credibility can drive change. You need to take you out of the equation.

That’s because the HiPPO, highest paid person’s opinion, at the table has her/his own priorities and experiences and context and opinions. They get priority over your experience, context and opinion.

While most HiPPO’s won’t yield to your Chinese Torture, they don’t have to, there are two things that they will almost always yield to:

Customers & Competitors.

When I say embarrass your senior management that’s what I mean.

Use your customers and competitors to help you move the ball forward (buy a new tool, hire another analyst, kill hideous home pages, spend right amounts on SEM and SEO, publish rich media on your site, implement feedburner, or whatever else you want).

Senior Managers are biased towards themselves, but they bow to customer data and competitive opportunities.

Here are 6 strategies you can use to bring the voice of the customer and perspective from competitors to the table, and win big (!!). . . .

Of course I’ll be glad to share detailed execution tips with you, keep an eye out for real stories from my own experience. . .

# 1: Implement a Experimentation & Testing Program.

This is the biggest no brainer, and the killer of most stupid ideas. It is the best way to take yourself out of the game: “It is not my opinion that dancing monkeys, or grey text on black background, don’t work. Here is data from our latest test.”

It is hard to say no to a Executive idea. But it is easy to say: “Excellent idea, why don’t we split traffic and send 50% of the home page traffic to your idea and get customer feedback on a no calls to action only video home page.”

Testing is great because you can get the most important person’s opinion: The Customer’s.

After a few times of being proven wrong even the biggest HiPPO will back off and give you all the support you need.

And now you have no excuse to avoid testing.

The Google Website Optimizer is free! It takes approximately six minutes to set up a A/B test with it (if your content is ready). Slightly longer to set up a multivariate test.

If you are looking for paid options then I like Offermatica a lot and Optimost gets good reviews too.

Want to learn about testing?

• Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
  
• Build A Great Web Experimentation & Testing Program

# 2: Capture Voice of Customer. Surveys, Remote Usability, Whatever.

Another excellent way to remove your opinion from the table and get the customer’s to get your Senior Management to change.

Do something simple: implement my The Three Greatest Questions Ever survey.

In one shot you’ll get Primary Purpose and help your Decision Makers understand that people don’t come to your website to look at your worst selling highest margin products. You’ll also get Task Completion Rate - how much your site is failing your customers.

Quick story: The first time we got the task completion and customer satisfaction scores for a Support website the score was 21. Out of a 100. Yes 100.

Essentially it was saying that the site purely existed to create Net Detractors, not Net Promoters (as was the intent). The company would have been better served by shutting the site. Yes some Customers would be upset that the company did not have a support site. But atleast they would not be actively pissed off after experiencing the site.

Root cause? I.T. owned the site. Yes a site for helping customers was owned and run by I.T.! Not the support team. Not Marketing. It was I.T.

As soon as the first survey responses were reported to the Senior Management they were so embarrassed that they immediately appointed a Director level person to exclusively own the site, on the business side, and gave him a small staff to create a best in class support website (and of course reduce support phone calls).

See what I mean by embarrassing management? That site had existed as is for five years. Then a small effort by some rouge surveyors changed it all.

Do that.

Want to learn more?

• Got Surveys? Recommendations from the Trenches

• Eight Tips For Choosing An Online Survey Provider

# 3: Deploy the Benchmarks I Say, Deploy ‘em Now!

You want time / money / attention / people for your website. Yet you get none. Time to benchmark against your competition (and hoping that they are doing better!).

Benchmarks can come in handy as a perfect way to set context around your own performance. Be it for in vogue metrics like Conversion Rates or for metrics that should be in vogue like Abandonment Rates. Sometimes this means being aware of how crappy your site is performing, and other times it means having the ammo you need to get a bonus.

You can use benchmarks such as the one dutifully provided by the Fireclick Index. . . .

Or from associations such as shop.org.

Or from your survey vendors such as the ACSI or the iPSI benchmarks for Customer Satisfaction for various companies / industry verticals.

Often with benchmarks we get into silly arguments like how do they measure this and that etc. Remember comparing for one point in time is usually sub optimal. But trended over time some of the vagaries of time, seasonality, formulas etc can be reduced. So understand how the benchmark is computed, make sure you have access to the best possible data and then go compare trends.

So when you use the Fireclick index Last Week, above, might be less useful. But that trend for the year is very helpful. Just lay your own performance line on top of that. Better still you are in the Electronics sector, compare it to the same sector.

It can be amazing to step outside your own web analytics tool data, your little silo, and look outside and compare. You may be considered tall in China but not in the Holland.

With benchmarks we are solving for the same thing as above: Providing a external opinion that is often easier to digest by our Managers.

# 4: Competitive Intelligence is Your New Best Friend.

I love this one, nothing like specific reality to hit you on the face like cold water.

Here is a example. Our company “owned” a category term. There were only two companies essentially competing and this was the Category key term. We were happy to have our web analytics tool show it all the time in our top referring keyword report. Bunch of traffic too.

The first time I logged into a CI tool and looked at our “share of search” I was dumb founded. We had 6% share of all the searches coming under that key phrase and, this made me cry, the top five sites that were getting traffic for “our” keyword were ones we had never heard of! Someone was eating our lunch and we had no idea!!

That’s what I mean.

After that I got all the money I wanted, and had been begging for, to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Here is another example. Say I work at LowesCompetitor.Com. I have been confident and happy. And my trends look nice.

But recently I have been learning a lot about changes to the site’s acquisition strategy, we are also having trouble getting support to make the site better and execute on our multichannel strategy.

Sadly I simply can’t get my executives to listen. Ahh but I have a friend, my competitive intelligence data! I locate it and show my executives this:

Whoa!!

Something is potentially dramatically wrong with LowesCompetitor.Com and potentially right with www.lowes.com. 11.8 pages per visit compared to 28.6! (Did I read that right 28! God I wish I owned lowes.com!!)

You can see how the second graph would be helpful to me in my battle to get the Management team’s attention. I bet no LowesCompetitor.Com Senior Executive would want the red trend to continue.

See what I mean? Embarrass your executives, in a good way.

Both examples above from www.compete.com a service with a ton of free competitive intelligence, and really really affordable deep search CI data.

There are other wonderful sets of data out there. I was trying to pull some from my HitWise login, which also has great data, but I kept getting access denied. See seven specific ideas in the first link below (tips & best practices).

Want more ideas of how to use Competitive Intelligence?

• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Metrics, Tips & Best Practices

• Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose

# 5: Hijack a Friendly Website (/ Earn Your Right to be Heard).

This was one of my early strategies when I kept getting resistance from “high levels”. I could not convert Them with words (”evangelizing” :) so I tried to show them that I deserved to be heard (/ listened to).

I went around the company meeting various website owners and making a judgment call on their need for data, their willingness to cooperate and take action. Then I picked a small site where the owner wanted to drive change and more importantly was open to our help. Then we gave that site all our love. Tagged it right, integrated their humble campaigns, shared insights with them that they could action (vs. reports that were data pukes), did a few A/B tests and so on and so forth.

In three months the site’s performance by every measure improved dramatically. Conversion went up, CPC and CPA’s went down, ROI went up, Bounce Rate went down and what not. In short we made the website owner a hero in the company.

Here was the amazing outcome: He went around presenting to Executives and other Business Unit Leaders and even the CEO to show how great his little site was doing (and yes a little bit of how great he was doing).

When people asked him how did you do that? He told the data story and working with our team.

That was priceless. Now everyone wanted to work with us.

So here is my advice to you: Make someone else a hero (and the center of attention). Not you.

Stop beating your head against a brick wall. Three years of that is enough. Find a willing partner, inside your direct responsibility or outside. Find a small site (or a big one) where you can make progress.

Then show ‘em what you can do.

www.missionbeachforrent.com might be a small site for some sweet condo rentals when you are in San Diego. . . .

. . . . but it is full of tracking possibilities. Outbound link tracking, form submissions, non-ecommerce tracking, downloads, offline conversions and on and on. If I can do all that with this, imagine what you can do with your business!

Here is a worst case scenario: If no one in your company wants to work with you then go outside.

Start a blog and go crazy with analytics (tools are free!). Here is what my blog has taught me (just one small blog!): Blog Analytics.

Show them what you have learned, reports and insights. They will listen because you would have not just been begging / griping / bitching / gnawing but rather you would have actioned things.

Earn the right to be heard.

# 6: If All Else Fails. . . . . Call Me!!

This one’s not as cheezy as it sounds.

Sometimes you need someone from the outside to show the vision, to throw some cold water on people’s faces, to hold up a mirror, to bring credibility and gravitas, help create a roadmap, be a ally, to charge you large sums of money so your CEO will take them seriously (if you are in this camp definitely call ME!).

Yes I can poke fun at myself. From the absolutely brilliant www.despair.com . . . .

So true!!!

It can seem that many Consultants / Consulting Companies operate on the Despair poster mindset. But there some who can meet the criteria of tip #6, here is how you’ll know who they are:

They are battle hardened from years of being a Practitioner, not stuffed with non empathetic only looking from the outside experience, and they have their feet firmly planted in the future not the past.

If tips 1 through 5 don’t work for you find the right Outsider and she/he can help, in case all of them are busy you can call me as a last resort.

That’s it. Post over.

Ok quick summary: The problem with Management support is not that you have not tried hard enough of that your ideas are not good enough. The problem is you have not tried to leverage your optimal weapons: Customers, Competitors & taking action to earn the right to be heard.

Go forth and “embarrass them”. I mean that in the kindest, gentlest way.

Good luck.

Now its your turn.

Please share your own lessons, perspectives, critique, bouquets and brickbats via comments. What works for you? What does not? Please add your voice. Thank you.

[Like this post? For more posts like this please click here, if it might be of interest please check out my book: Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.]

This post could also have been titled “Tracking Radio Ads” or “Measuring Online Impact of Offline Marketing” or “Success in a Nonline World“. It will touch on all of those.

But the title is what it is because the most lovely part of this story was how tracking with a one dimensional mindset (or in a silo) means that you will end up missing so much of the picture. And it is a story about what it means to be a Analyst in this day and age.

[This post is dedicated to my friend Nick: You are a sweetie! Thanks for everything.]

A delightful company, let’s call them Market Fire Extinguishers, located at www . marketfireextinguishers . com (there is no such site as of today), would like to grow their business. They have tried lots of nice things online (primarly affiliate marketing). It worked ok.

Then they came upon a radical, for the web, idea: Run radio ads around the country!

This is getting easier to do than ever with many leading companies getting into the space and lowering the barriers to entry. Even I can run a 50 city radio ad for Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

They ran campaigns across the US, in 50+ DMAs each that had their own set of cities.

The call to action was primarily driving people online, via a easy to remember vanity url (redirect) www . eztz . com (I am making that up here to protect the client). The audio ad also mentioned a toll free 800 number that listeners could call and purchase the product.

Using the vanity was smart, for tracking purposes (hurray!), keeping it easy to remember was even smarter. Driving people to the site was a business requirement because picking up the phone is expensive.

The first “management” level reporting was extremely simple, and visually appealing (after all pretty sells!). It was an attempt at answering the question: “we have all these ads running in 500 plus cities, which of those are effective at driving traffic to our website?”.

Here is the baseline picture, before the campaign. . . .

And here is the picture that shows the impact of the radio ads. . . .

Sweet lord that is impact! Get me the champagne!

The nice “chicken pox” geo report is a good visualization in this case because it quickly shows the top 100 cities that sent in the traffic. The before and after makes a nice story in of itself in terms of showing impact of the campaign.

It is also easy, as you can imagine, to dig deeper into the data and analyze all 500 plus cities that sent traffic. You will surely go in and look at the audio ad costs in each city, the number of listeners in each (from a source like Arbitron), the number of resulting Visits and Absolute Unique Visitors etc.

Being a fan of the Trinity Strategy you will surely dive into understanding outcomes (lead forms submitted, orders placed, samples requested and what not). Then you can pick which cities were ROI positive, which were not etc etc.

One of these days it will be easy for you to do much of the above analysis in your web analytics tool.

One graph you will surely create will look like this one. . . .

A correlation of two trends, the brown is the radio ad impressions that you achieved during the course of this campaign. In blue is the resulting traffic to the website.

Nice. Clear correlation between the ad showing up and the traffic spiking on the site, the ebb and flow also match nicely though after every drop in impressions you see residual impact on the site traffic (the blue line drops less dramatically). All very wonderful.

Most people will leave it at this when it comes to measuring success for their campaigns (be they email or audio or tv or SEM/PPC or direct marketing etc). On the web, delightfully I might add, it is rare that a butterfly flutters its wing here and a tree falls in the amazon. (Ok I have been unwell for a few days now and am out of my metaphors juice!)

You take action in one channel / medium and it will surely have a impact in other channels / mediums.

“Unsuspected correlations.”

So when you analyze your own campaigns / valiant traffic driving efforts, correlate other sets of data you have to see if there are hidden correlations that could help you understand the story better.

In our story the Analyst Ninja did exactly that and added a line to the graph showing the Traffic from Branded Search for the same time duration. . . .

Lovely!

Not only did the radio campaigns drive people to the site using the easy to remember vanity url, eztz . com, but our lovely radio audience, brainwashed as they are like the rest of us, also ended up typing in queries into the search engine and arriving at our site.

Not a flash in the pan, but a consistent trends, mirroring the ebbs and flows of the radio ads.

This was a surprise because that vanity is not that hard to remember yet people used the terms mentioned in the ad (company name, product name, other brand or category terms) and used a search engine to get to the site.

Lesson: People behave in ways that they are used to and many of ‘em won’t do what you want them to do!

Unsuspected correlation in this case raised the amount of ROI the audio campaign could claim.

But our brave Analyst was not one yet. She tried one more thing. . . .

Direct traffic in light blue.

Again a clear trend in the impact of the radio ads on the Direct Traffic (your web analytics tool could be calling this “bookmarks” or “type in” or “none” etc). Technically it is people who have “no referrers” in their session.

In this case it was people who, again this is normal on the web, heard Market Fire Extinguishers and typed in www . marketfireextinguishers .com and got to the site. And that is a hard url to spell!

Another unsuspecting correlation.

In the end the impact of the radio campaigns on this particular website was significantly more than original imagined.

There are interesting implications of the above when it comes to your next media buy and the kind of customer behaviour that will impact it.

Net Net: Next time you are asked to produce a ROI analysis perhaps you’ll think of this example and ask yourself if you have correlated enough data streams and looked hard enough to paint the complete picture.

Important Web Analyst Skill Observation:

There is one other facet of this lesson that was important to me. Lots of us get so entrenched in numbers and analysis and Omniture / WebTrends / Google Analytics / IndexTools etc that we often lose touch with the outside world.

The worlds of 1) online marketing (latest trends, happenings, changes, techniques, what not) and 2) online customer behavior (again latest behavioral trends, how people experience the web, likes, dislikes etc).

If you want to be a Magnificent Analyst spend 50% of your time with the above two. Anyone can learn to press buttons or extract data into excel. And thousands are learning that every day. What will set you apart will be your superior knowledge of the marketing and customer experience ecosystem in which we all exist.

Less than 10% of the Analysts I meet are proficient in those two things, almost everyone is proficient in the numerous web analytics tools.

It might seem obvious in hindsight to do the above analysis, I assure you that it was not. The person who did this was less a “web analyst” and more a “online marketer”, the 10% I mention above.

Be that.

Important Observation #2: Correlation does not imply causation.

Correlations are a very advanced statistical technique that I am using in perhaps its most humble and lame manner above. (That had to be said!)

More importantly it is important to realize that Correlation does not imply causality.

In our case above we controlled for other externals factors (no other campaigns running, no weird seasonality carp - notice the campaigns ran after Christmas etc). This was to ensure that we were not seeing patterns where none should exist.

It is important to internalize this.

Another example. Here are number of posts I have written in the last few months and the number of RSS feed subscribers in each.

Oct: 6 posts, 5,542 subscribers.
Nov: 5 posts, 5,829 subscribers.
Dec: 4 posts, 6,338 subscribers.
Jan: 4 posts, 6,898 subscribers.
Feb: 2 posts, 7,666 subscribers.

The less I write the more subscribers I get (!!).

Those two variables seem to be correlated, but they are (hopefully!!) not causal.

So be careful with causation.

That’s it. Lesson over. Hopefully you found it to be of value.

Now its your turn.

Please share your own lessons, perspectives, critique, bouquets and brickbats via comments. What works for you? What does not? Add your voice. Thank you.

[Like this post? For more posts like this please click here, if it might be of interest please check out my book: Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.]

PS:
Couple other related posts:

• Excellent Analytics Tip#1: Statistical Significance
• Personas, Customer Value, Customer Retention and Non-line Marketing
• Data Mining And Predictive Analytics On Web Data Works? Nyet!
• Top Ten: Signs You Are A Great Analyst

It will soon be a year of working at Google and milestones are always a good time for introspection.

I have a lot on my mind but there was one thing in particular that I wanted to share with you all:

What it is has been like working at Google.

Interesting, fun, surprising, insightful, inspiring, impactful, and more such words. This post shares that experience.

I went into Google with my own filters and expectations on what the experience would be like and what I would end up doing.

Looking back the reality has been different in so many ways, even for a jaded Silicon Valley veteran of layoffs and cool companies like myself.

Before I get any further I wanted to mention that I am the Analytics Evangelist for Google. I am a Consultant (a “red badge” as I often remark!). There is little difference between roles and expected outcomes between a full time employee and a consultant - nonetheless there is a very different benefits structure at multiple levels for consultants (as Johnny Law dictates). I also don’t have any holdings of Google stock, and, not being a full time employee, I also don’t hold any Google options.

Also my experience is positive, there is a small community that seeks sub optimal stuff about Google constantly. You can bounce now because you won’t find it here.

With that squared away, ever wonder what makes Google tick?

Here are ten insights from / cool things about / reasons for / delightful surprises from almost a year of working at Google:

Let me share some of the reasons why I picked the above ten. . . .

# 10: The amazingly fantastic food and impressive digs.

I am sure you have heard about the food, everything you have heard is true (and it probably understates the story).

Brett had always said one of the reasons I should work at Google was the food. My reply was “My level of gourmet is Taco Bell“. :)

But he was right. I am convert (and much to Jennie’s delight my level of gourmet is slowly moving up!).

Google has impressive food. It is not just that it is yummy, it is, but it is more that the diversity of the food and how fresh everything is and the number of cafes and dishes that you’ll encounter only in the nicest restaurants.

I still can’t get used to the fact that every day when I walk into a cafe the food is different and delicious and healthy and mostly organic.

Here’s just one example:

      Red beet “Ravioli” with tarragon, cashew filling and yellow pepper puree.

It was to die for. And that’s from a Taco Bell gourmet!

If you are at the Googleplex try to go to Cafe No Name (I love that place - world fusion food) and skip Charlie’s. In Mt. View I also like Pure Ingredients, Slice (raw, vegan food, great smoothies as well) and Pintxo 47 (tapas!), each is unique in its own way. Hemispheres in NYC is also excellent.

You can eat every day at Google and never get bored. And you eat healthy, while having a nice one hour relaxing lunch with your co-workers.

As to the digs, I live in the Valley but I have also spent time at Google New York, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and London. If you visit them I am sure you’ll agree they are cool digs.

Space Ship One in B43 in Mt. View. . . .

Maybe it is how each person personalizes their environment, maybe it is the vibrant colors, maybe it is the energy of people bustling around, maybe it is the pure oxygen that is pumped into each Google building worldwide (a reporter actually asked me that!).

You’ll find cubicles that are 100% aluminum foil wrapped, others that are homages to star wars, others to universities or pop culture or countries or customers or …… its a long list.

Here’s a good example. . . .

This past week I was in Atlanta and on my way to a conference room when I was stopped in my tracks. On my right was a Zen oasis. Mood lighting, bean bags and comfy chairs, plants, six small water fountains making bubbling soothing sounds. Ten mins in there will recharge anyone before or after a few hours of work (or after every hour of work!).

It is fun to work in a creative environment where collaboration is encouraged by the open layouts and yet you are never far from a nice view.

# 9: “Micro Efficiencies”.

Google has all these “micro efficiencies” that are very clever and well thought out. Each in a small way makes life easy for someone working at Google, but taken in aggregate, in my opinion, add up to a big advantage for the company.

Here’s a tiny example. . . .

All conference rooms are wired for everything you need to make your life easy. In my prior companies I had to reserve a projector, and mostly forgot, and carry my power bricks and my ethernet cables etc. At Google all the power adapters you need are in the conf room, Apple or ThinkPads, and there are two projectors in every conf room (and most have high bandwidth video conferencing) and did you see the dvi - vga converters? This makes my life easier in a small but significant way.

I also absolutely love the tech stop idea. If there is a tech support issue no need to open a ticket and wait for salvation from the help desk (though you can), you can simply walk to the closest Tech Stop and the Geek Gods there will fix any problem on the spot (and they smile and are super nice people). What a time saver!

Ditto for the Hardware Depots in various buildings. Need a mouse or head phones or a battery or power adapter or . . . any peripheral? Walk into the the Hardware Depot, scan your badge, pick up, walk out. Very convenient, huge time saver (no need to fill requisitions and do a long line of paperwork!).

There are so many little things that you’ll find at Google that you’ll come to appreciate, especially if you have worked for a while at other companies.

Micro efficiencies that result in significant macro efficiency.

# 8: A company that truly cares.

You sit on the outside and you read all the stories and your first thought was: “Yeah right! They do “all that”! Probably just to keep you at work and working like a dog.“

To some extent I did too.

I was wrong, and so are you.

For any company it is easy to provide you with free food, get you shuttles to commute, have beer parties on fridays, decorate the offices nice, and have free drinks and Naked Juices. If it wanted to.

Typically what happens is that you get bored of the “cafe food” and the rest pretty quickly because often companies pay lip service to things like that.

At Google the food never gets boring because each cafe has a executive / sous chef and when you eat they’ll come chat with you and ask you what you think of the food (to your utter shock the first few times). They actually care.

TGIF each friday at Google is something else.

The commute shuttles are very comfortable, have wi-fi and are frequent.

I am struck at how with everything there is this touch of extra, and that shows that the company does really care about you.

Here is another example that struck me. . . .

We live in earthquake belt. And it is not that hard to create a earthquake kit for yourself. Gallon of water, first aid kit, manually chargeable flashlight / radio etc etc. Not that hard, yet few of us have it.

A couple of months ago I saw the Google employees walking around with nifty backpacks. They were earthquake kits that Google created for and gave all its employees (not contractors, legally that is not allowed).

That was so nice. It even had water! The company did not have to do it, to me it was about going to extra step for their employees.

This is why Google employees are so loyal to their company, the company tries to care for them and the employees care back.

# 7: Brain expansion opportunities.

For some reason this one surprised me. I don’t know why.

This is not a uncommon sight as you walk into Google buildings. . . .

On any given day at Google there are brilliant people visiting and giving talks and lectures. Politicians, authors (even niche ones: me!), professors, bright young folks (me, long ago!), environmentalists, journalists, dignitaries, monks, Nobel prize winners, venture capitalists and so on and so forth.

I am astounded at the ability to have access to so many brilliant and leading minds. If I have some time then I can take an hour out, go listen to someone brilliant and stretch my brain on a wide variety of topics.

Check these out:

• Google engEDU Tech Talks Channel
• Authors @ Google

After a while at any company your mind gets stale, you can’t get out except for a conference or such. At Google you have alternatives.

This past year I have learned about microexpressions from Paul Ekman (be careful if you see me intently scanning your face!), saw the light when Barack Obama spoke, realized why John Chambers is so well admired, sat two seats away from Al Gore (the day before he won his Nobel prize!), had lunch with Guy Kawasaki, gave a presentation right after Ian Ayres (!!) and well I could keep going. I am sure you get the point.

At Google I am grateful to have the chance to exercise brain, get a new idea, learn something I otherwise would not have. It is priceless!

# 6: The sheer amount of brilliant Google employees.

There is a myth that everyone who works at Google is smart / brilliant / genius / replace your own term here. That is not true. Not everyone.

You’ll still be astounded at the hit rate of truly brilliant google employees to the sub brilliant ones (see Mom, I can be diplomatic!).

It really does not matter who you are and what you have done before. You could be the greatest at your own field, I assure you in your meetings and as you walk around you’ll see and work with people who you think are genius.

It will keep you humble, and that is a good thing. :)

Here’s an example. . .

This, as you’ll surely recognize, is Hans Rosling. . . .

To people who have anything to do with data he is pretty much as good as it gets. His cube is ten meters from where I sit. When I see him I am as giddy as a school girl who has just seen Brad Pitt.

If you don’t know who Hans is check out these two videos (a must watch for anyone who remotely things they present data or do data visualization):

• Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen
• New insights on poverty and life around the world

He is scanning my book in the picture. Can you imagine how incredibly cool that is for a humble little web analytics author like myself? I of course insisted he keep it.

It is a lot of fun working with smart people because they push you to be better, because you are sure the collaboration will result in something beautiful. Even when you can’t talk quite the same “language”. . . .

That’s from my white board. Phil is in the blue. I am the red. Notice his use of math as visualization. Notice my method of visualization. I smiled in the end, he is “Googlely” in his approach, me less so!!

[PS: That is the standard definition of what constitutes a bounce in scenarios where additional pieces of data exist - like exit clicks, event logging entries etc - and what the impact is on standard computation of Time On Site in those scenarios. How cool is that? :)]

Not everyone at Google is brilliant, but you’ll constantly find people who inspire you and who you’ll learn from. It is nice to have so many people who you’ll genuinely respect.

# 5: Empowerment (The big small company).

If you are good at something, have passion to do it then you’ll get empowered to go do it.

I know that sounds basic. It is not.

You could be just out of college and if want to then you’ll get to solve some of the most complex challenges you would ever find. At other companies you’ll get put into a hierarchy with layers and controls were for the first four years you might learn where all the files are.

I am being a bit dramatic, but not all that much.

In my second week there I was walking over to lunch with a young man and he was describing his work to me. He had been at Google for less than a year, straight from college and had completely rewritten one of the most challenging “code” during the last few months and his work had yielded dramatic results for Google.

He is good at what he does but I was simply struck by how a company this size would let someone so young and “untested” the task for solving such a complex challenge. And how awesome must it feel to know that you did that!

That’s what I mean by empowerment.

[Google NYC campus building made out of legos, above.]

Google is not a very small company (GOOG). It is only ten years old, and it is a “big” company now. Yet it functions like a small company. People sit together, cross functional teams, and each group is holistically responsible for getting stuff done. Few layers, lots of empowerment.

It is a big small company. That is the secret.

If you want to bite of a humongo challenge, and I do mean humongo, then you can rest assured that you’ll get a chance to do it. You have to be passionate about your cause and be competent at it. Your youth or old age, your big title or small one, your “tenure” at the company will rarely be barriers.

You want to get @#$& done? You can.

That’s a good feeling.

# 4: The scale of your impact.

This one is my personal favorite.

Google is not quite as big as many companies out there, but in its space it has a huge user base for most of its applications (search and beyond). Anything you work on will probably touch hundreds of thousands of people - if not multiple times that.

It is such a awesome thrill when you see your work in the hands of so many folks on this planet.

I think of a small idea and collaborate with the team and bam (!) they make it a reality.

In a few days something that was just in your brain is now in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people!

I open the app and there is such a deep sense of gratification when I see parts of it that helped with (”mine! that’s mine!”).

But more than that there is a thrill in the realization that something I helped create takes out just a little bit of stress out (even if five seconds worth) of the Users lives, makes data just a smidgen easier to understand, make a tiny bit of difference in how their customer experience.

In many other companies it takes time to drive change (see #5 above), even then you are just a cog, and even then your power to touch people (end users) is limited.

The scale at which you can touch people and make a tiny bit of difference in their day to day life is huge at Google.

It is also very liberating that you can do the right thing, the products are mostly free so you don’t have to worry about the vagaries of trying to do things that are fluff or driven by other interests. You can focus on the customers.

The impact, for you and me, results in a high, a very high high.

# 3: Doing Good: Green & .org

This might not resonate with everyone but it is very important to me. One of the reasons Intuit was so nice, they did so many good and charitable things.

I am a Northern California person, I am green, I buy everything in An Inconvenient Truth! :)

Google has lots and lots of green initiatives. From the solar panels on the car ports that are around the buildings. . . .

to initiatives like the greener cars (I know green car is a oxymoron) like the plugin hybrid. . . .

to the cup of juice that I pick up at breakfast. . . .

In small and big ways you’ll see around the offices Google takes green seriously in a very real and meaningful way.

They also support great causes, like the matching program for OLPC (one laptop per child) when you could buy one laptop and one would be given free to a child in the third world. Google’s match meant two laptops would be given out for the one you bought.

google.org is a very ambitious initiative to to make a immense difference in the world that we live in. Lots of companies are lucky to be blessed with great wealth. I am always biased in favor of companies that don’t wait to make a difference, they take action right way. Be it google.org or WalMart and their CFL initiative or the, most ambitious of it all, efforts of the Gates Foundation.

At a personal level it feels good to be a part of a company that tries to make a difference (and some day Google will even lick the problem of how much power web servers consume!!).

# 2: It’s a happening place. The energy, the vibe, the passion.

Cool projects + empowerment + size of impact = A energetic fun happening place.

:)

Google employees are a passionate bunch, the have a energy to themselves regardless of how big or small their project is, and they are passionate. People work hard (and I might stress play hard, see below), and you feed off their energy.

There is this constant sense that you are doing something to change the world, there is very positive vibe.

A great example is Testing On The Toilet.

Yes you heard it right.

I can only speak for the mens restroom of course. As you stand (or sit :) you can’t fail to notice that in front of you a page that teaches the importance of testing. Each week a new “episode”. Techie stuff, python and sawzall and bigtable and loops and so on and so forth.

That would be inconsequential (just like the sign that says “wash your hands after using the bathroom”). But the amazing thing is that these docs, deeply technical as they are, are written with a great sense of humor. Often subtle, usually techie, always entertaining.

It is not unusual for even someone like me to just stand there and read the whole thing (sadly blocking traffic!). I don’t understand everything they teach but I am consistently struck by how well written it is, and the passion of the people who take writing better code so seriously.

It’s just a example of the energy that you’ll see, passionate people trying to do the right thing with a smile.

As Martha would say “That’s a good thing.”

# 1: The brand.

My son Chirag will be four in a couple months. The first word he could spell without looking at it was G O O G L E. I think he was two and half.

I don’t wear too many Google shirts, I don’t have too much Google stuff. He had visited Google a couple of times, he loves walking around, looking at stuff etc. As a result he has this deeply favorable view of the Google “brand”.

I was impressed. Remember this is a little kid (he can spell more things now!).

The interesting thing is that the Google brand has the same effect on people of all ages. There is a thriving cottage industry in sub optimal google thoughts, but for the most part people have a wonderful positive response when you tell them you work for Google (even as a consultant!).

My friend Blaire was telling me how she gets stopped and asked nice things when she is wearing the Google “girl power” t-shirt. That’s branding.

People have a positive opinion of Google and it transfers to your sense of pride in your company. Goes to show if you just produce a good product it can translate into something remarkable (something worth remarking).

Google is amongst a select list of companies that will look good on your resume for some time to come, there is little doubt about that.

Phew, deep breath.

That’s the top ten reflecting on my own experience as a consultant at Google.

There are other things that full time employees might list, the 20% time, or 401k or health insurance or other benefits.

A parting thought. . . .

Google is 10 years old. Just 10 years old. The top ten list above illustrates perhaps some of why it has become so good so fast. Some things above are hard to do, but most big companies (say Fortune 1,000 atleast) can easily do all of them. Yet they don’t.

The net net of all of the above is, IMHO, that Google is a faith based initiative. If you treat your employees exceptionally and give them room to breath, then they will reward you exceptionally.

What about the future?

What the company and its people have accomplished thus far is simply astounding.

But it has yet to face a shock, yet to truly feel pressured, yet to miss earnings for a couple of quarters.

It will.

It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. Circle of life.

It faces many challenges. It is doing many things right and it is probably doing other things wrong, and it does not know it yet. Time will tell.

There is a famous quote used by the great Warren Buffett. . . .

      “It’s not until the tide goes out that you realize who’s swimming naked .”

Google’s greatness, and longevity, will be determined by not what it would have done until that point. But what it does when the tide goes out. Which perks go first, who makes the first sacrifices, what happens to the list of 10 above?

I am hopeful, based on my experience, that it will make the right choices.

PS:
Couple other (non Google, but leadership) related posts:

• Three “spire’s” of Great Leadership
• Nine Rules To Work / Live By