[hintymad]

I actually don't believe 5-year plan would work. Great products are built, not planned. A plan to keep management patient for 5 years, though, will work better. In AWS, a newly launched service will not seek profitability but user growth for at least the first two years, if not three. And then the GM of the service needs to pursue profitability and margin, while keeping user growth healthy. That said, product features are planned on a 6-month basis, and GMs have have moving target of profitability as market conditions often change.

[potatolicious]

Agreed, in part - and agreed with the other poster here that great products are both.

Google tends to suffer from the worst of both worlds: an over-abundance of 5-year plans that do not offer sufficient interim value to justify their continued work.

Part of this is bad projections - Google projects are often highly-ambitious multi-year affairs with some interim checkpoints like growth rate, but those numbers are usually poorly estimated, poorly sourced, wildly overly optimistic, and don't actually pan out. So when the team inevitably whiffs the checkpoints by a wide margin entire products get shut down. This is at least one of the larger causes of the leadership churn I described above.

But yes, if your idea is that you can have a 5-year budget to go do [insert big ambitious thing] and management won't cry about it, that's a fantasy.

That said, the opposite is also not a great way to pursue a product - which mostly rests on the theory that pursuing near-term improvements repeatedly naturally wins.

In reality you want a mixture of long-term strategy with short-term tactics. Product teams that are too heavily in one direction fail for it.

[pg_1234]

To bring it back to the CEO question.

This is because they have a "caretaker CEO".

Google wa sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.

In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.

They don't have this.

That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.

Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.

[potatolicious]

Ehh, I would not be hasty in blaming things on Sundar as a "caretaker CEO". My impression has been that this inability to ship started well before Sundar's reign, and goes into a core belief that the company has been built around since its early days.

The problem with Google is that far too much product authority is devolved into leaf node teams. But this isn't a quirk of Sundar's leadership, this is practically a shibboleth built into the DNA of Google itself. The idea is that autonomous teams of very smart people, given maximum freedom to pursue what they think is necessary, produces the best products.

This is one of the fundamental buildings blocks of Google and long pre-dates Sundar as CEO. And it is the thing that is failing.

What we're witnessing is IMO a repudiation of the idea that if you take smart people and "free range" them, they will spontaneously invent world-changing products. FWIW, I think the strategy has been clearly failing for a long time - the only product that came out of this system was Gmail. Quite literally everything else at Google that has survived the test of time was acquired (see: YouTube, Maps).

I think Sundar may end up taking the fall for being caught flat-footed, and surely as CEO he should rightly shoulder some of the blame, but Google's problems far pre-date him. It's also why I don't think the triumphant return of Larry and Sergey will necessarily fix things - they're the ones who instituted the system of autonomous teams.

[umeshunni]

The terms "Wartime CEO" and "Peacetime CEO" come to mind.

https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/

[hintymad]

Yeah, my statement went too far. I was just trying to emphasize that many aspects of a product will emerge from iterations, therefore 5-year plan sounds a gross waterfall model. That said, some planning is needed.

[JohnFen]

> Great products are built, not planned.

Great products are both.