[benzewdu]

Although there is a well-defined process for launch approvals, Google does not have a well-defined process for project approval or cancellation. Despite having been at Google for nearly 10 years, and now having become a manager myself, I still don’t fully understand how such decisions are made.

The reason why I quit Google.

[kyrra]

The rest of the paragraph you quote is fairly important as it goes on to explain cases and how a project can be cancelled.

The rest of the quote:

In part this is because the approach to this is not uniform across the company. Managers at every level are responsible and accountable for what projects their teams work on, and exercise their discretion as they see fit. In some cases, this means that such decisions are made in a quite bottom-up fashion, with engineers being given freedom to choose which projects to work on, within their team’s scope. In other cases, such decisions are made in a much more top-down fashion, with executives or managers making decisions about which projects will go ahead, which will get additional resources, and which will get cancelled.

[benzewdu]

The question isn't how, it's why. I wish i could share the details.

[wingless]

And on the other end of the spectrum we had Jobs era Apple, with One True God overseeing all demigods who oversee projects. IMO the things that made Apple products so successful was this structure which left no room for confusion and that the company was run by QA people. My impression of Jobs is that he was a QA guy himself.

[qu1j0t3]

Jobs was notoriously a capricious micromanager at NeXT; see e.g. "The NeXT Big Thing", Randall Stross.

Thanks to the secrecy that shrouds everything Apple, it's hard to get a handle on whether he became a more evolved manager (or, let's not euphemise: less of a flaming asshole) later on at Apple.

[dajohnson89]

Customers feel it too -- eg reader.