[nouseforaname]

My take: we need to stop incentivizing "innovation" where everything needs to be rewritten every couple months just so someone can "disrupt" something.

You know what it really is? It's a bunch of product people, all of who want to be Steve Jobs II, looking at the handful of innovative products Apple made over the last couple of decades and trying to achieve something similar results every single quarter.

The problem? We've raised a whole generation of people who think that's not how you make products people love. We've have a whole generation of people who focus 100% on the ideation phase and 0% on the nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback.

This fits into a larger theory I have that basically disruptive startups are the weeds of the ecosystem, but they aren't old growth trees. Call me old fashioned but I'm looking forward to the day "disruptive" companies based on "growth hacking" are replaced by some giant redwood trees that will stand the test of time as they (slowly) soar into the sky.

[derefr]

You're talking like these are the same people ideating and then dropping products over and over.

No: the people who build each product, even at Google, certainly enter a "nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback" phase with that product.

The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted, if they don't build a new fiefdom to call their own?

The actual question I have about Google and its business strategy, is why these new products always seem to displace old products (and their teams), rather than resulting in the internal equivalent of a merger.

I can see good reason to have four teams building four distinct web VoIP clients, if one of them is the "flagship" one and three of them are experiments. I can also imagine one of those "experiments" getting really popular. But why should that result in the "flagship" dying? Why not just merge the teams together, and put the team from the "experiment" in charge of the pooled UX design talent for a new release of the "flagship" client?

[josteink]

> there are always new product people joining the company. And what the heck are they going to do to get recognized and promoted

Maybe I don’t get it, but it seems weird to me that everyone needs to get promoted all the time.

Where I live you get employed in a position and most people stay in that position for most of their career.

You may climb the ranks, but that’s not something everyone does all the time.

[exitheone]

At Google, promotion does not change your position, it changes your "Level", which roughly rewards you for having wider-ranging influence as an engineer. You don't get promoted to management or anything like that. You stay an engineer.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

[pmlnr]

Thank you. I thought I was alone with these thoughts.

I was not promoted in 5 years, since I joined my current company, and that is OK. I still have 32 years to work, at least.

[afthonos]

You’re describing exactly what Google is doing with Gmail and Inbox.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but my projects are only tangentially related.

[derefr]

Yes, Gmail after the Inbox "experiment" is an example of Google doing the right thing. I'm just wondering why that strategy is so rare. Is it a new mode of thinking within Google? Did Google only recently manage to become 'un-flat' enough that there are people with high-level project-management expertise available to suggest something like a merger between two teams?

[mciak]

This doesn’t really hold true in China —- Steve Jobs is revered there but their startup scene is heavily oriented towards iterating and pivoting