[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?