Marissa Mayer: Yahoo Products Must Ship In 6 Months, Or Don't Bother
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-- Dr Linda Lewis (Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons)
Google has been working on their automatic car tech for ~5 years. Amazon has been working on the kindle line for ~7 years. Google's project glass took ~4 years and they've been working on social for ~3 years. SpaceX on the falcon for ~5 years and Tesla Motors on the roadster for ~7 years.
Sometimes the better thing to do is quite literally do nothing before you go pull off a Nokia like move (sucking up to the losing horse in mobile) or the like. That doesn't mean pull a RIMM either.
This kind of thinking isn't very good because it completely disregards the uncertainty present in product development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doctors_Think#Disregard_of_...).
Looking from the outside, they seem to have a dysfunctional culture around shipping software with all the additional layers of management. Hopefully this changes and they have a chance producing meaningful products but I'm not hopeful.
Now, it's better to spend those 3 years iterating than planning - rumor has it that the GMail prototype was built in a day. But it's worth being realistic about how long it takes to build a world-changing product - it's a long road. (In fairness to Marissa, I'm sure she knows this, and I suspect she's just trying to get the release cycle down so that Yahoo can make forward progress.)
Apparently it was available internally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
It certainly does not take 3 years to produce GMail, if they had the focus.
Maybe this is not the right time for Yahoo to do 3 year products simply because they suck at it (I spent more than 3 years at Yahoo, and I spent most of that time trying to shepherd projects through to the point my engineering team would actually get a go-ahead; we were a service function without direct control of a product, otherwise we should've just gone for it rather than wait...), and practising on 6 month projects could still bring a ton of useful improvements or smaller services. One thing to keep in mind with Yahoo is that it has a vast array of sites and services just sitting there - I bet there's a ton of poorly monetized services that could get drastic upgrades in well below 6 months if there's just sufficient fire behind someones asses...
Then they can start trying to add the standalone world-changing stuff again later, if they're successful.
Companies have to react to where and what they are. A perfectly sensible policy for one company may not work for another, and it's certainly no criticism of a given policy to point out it isn't universally applicable to all companies.
Also, the it needs to be a product that could reach 100 million users or $100 million dollars is a great filter. It provides focus.
Unfortunately, based on the last 10 years of Yahoo's corporate history, there are probably a lot of bad habits and corporate culture shenanigans that will need to be dealt with before Yahoo's actions match their CEO's marching orders.
At least Yahoo is trying to do something hopefully more interesting than being another internet media company held over from the AOL era of the internet. Perhaps soon someone at Yahoo! will be able to clearly explain what Yahoo! is and does.
There seems to be much adoration on HN for anything Marissa Mayer says. I watched a few interviews of her, she has an uncomfortable personality, hard to listen to imo.
Downside: like you say, it'll cause second guessing. It might be a genuinely great idea but no one is sure how it's going to spin out in the real world, which could create a business of conservative ideas.
Upside: Yahoo needs new things to get the attention back to "Yahoo has released a new product, and it does X" rather than "Yahoo hasn't done anything and we think they're sucky".
It depends if the 100 million users is a fast and firm thing, if it's a case of get it done in 6 months or aim for 100 million users it could be more interesting. Lots of crazy idea being done quickly.
> Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.
But isn't that sort of what she's doing? She is limiting the downside by setting a time limit. She is ensuring people aim high enough with the $100m number.
I worked in engineering in Yahoo 2003-2005 (I feel old - it doesn't feel like 7 years ago...), specifically the European biling platform (yes, Yahoo had multiple - on the order of 10 distinct billing systems at the time, for various reasons, some good some not so good).
I spent those years without writing a single line of code at work, despite a small team, because about 2/3's of my time was taken up reading product requirements documents from business units that wanted to add features tied in with premium services / billing and attending project meetings.
Of all those projects, maybe 10% went anywhere. The rest spent months in PRD hell. Whole business units where dithering back and forth as to whether they should even try selling stuff, when the resource cost of trying was substantially smaller than the resource cost of the endless project meetings.
There were probably no $100m opportunities amongst the ones I reviewed when limited to the countries in Europe that actually were actively involved with the billing team. But that was part of the problem: People were far more concerned with delivering stuff that was successful than with the big picture, and so we only got go-ahead for projects when the business unit were really, really sure they'd make a good amount of money from adding premium services to a product.
And then only market by market, with many markets remaining totally unserved because the local team didn't believe in the project enough to want to stick their necks out. While I was there, we kept trying to get Yahoo Italy and Spain to start billing for something - anything - for example; in 4 years that went nowhere.
If you work at Yahoo (or Google, or Facebook), and the product you want to work on ins't going to affect 100 million users, then you should probably be working somewhere else, it's simply the nature of their businesses.
If you want to make niche software, Yahoo is not the place to go it, anymore than Unilever is the place for people who want to make small amounts of high qualty hand made soaps.
I think that's what She's going for.
I just don't think this is realistic. It's a nice goal and a nice thought but unless they're building HTML 5 games or something and counting those as products it's just not realistic. But we shall see.
Yahoo isn't exactly sending men to Mars, they're cobbling together fairly simplistic web apps to serve ads and perhaps even subscriptions that at best need a bit of fancy realtime communication or maybe a very large database in the background. For these kinds of apps and open source where it is now, you can get 'prototype one' built in about 90 minutes by one guy defining a bunch of models and a 0 byte index.html.
Given a team of 3, one week is more than enough time to have a couple of buttons, some rough page layout, and most importantly an increasingly sterling idea of the problems you're going to start running into and how you need to adjust. It's called iterative software development, it's great.
Now just add one PM to whip the software kids in the right direction, and you have a viable chance at delivering an internal demo in 2-3 months.
If Yahoo's goal is to develop simplistic Web software then I retract my statement, but we're talking about something absolutely worlds away from the type of stuff that Google has been producing, or even Yahoo over the past several years.
This is not to say that a six month development cycle is impossible. There just has to be an understanding that there will be a trade-off in quality. Maybe Mayer is in the "get something out there fast, and reiterate based on feedback" boat (which would make me respect her more) but going from 0 to 100 in six months is impossible with the scale of projects Yahoo! works on.
Why start there? Why not look at the whole picture and loan her the benefit of the doubt, saying, "I believe with your experience it's likely that you're familiar with software development. Therefore I won't assume this is a massive brainfart, even if part of my mental model of the world thinks it could be. Without that assumption, what are you trying to communicate with this, and why? What can I learn from this, and do I need to update my mental model?"
Assuming naivety is unreasonably dismissive, and says more about the critic than the policy or policymaker.
6 months is a good target. It'll keep new projects lean and focused. It should sway the balance of power more to engineering while forcing the business-side / product management to work tightly with engineering... Or force the product managers to take a back seat for the initial release of a project.
Eventually your products, your development capacity and feel for the customers needs now is so out of touch, you cannot get back.
We don't have the full context of her statement, and I'm guessing (hoping) that she isn't expecting version 1 to be a runaway success, but will allow the team to continue iterating and pivoting, if necessary, before making the determination of whether the project was worthwhile.
When Google launches a beta (or even alpha), they watch for adoption and "hockey stick" growth. If a project gains traction, the MVP will be augmented with features during the 2-3 years it takes to reach 100M users or $100M.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Really if you want big $100 million dollar wins you had better make with big million dollar rewards for the people delivering. That is impossible because the management bureaucracy will soak that right up. Yahoo should focus on rewarding the right people through acquisitions and investments.
I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.
Buying a promising startup and smothering it with their existing bureaucracy would only hurt their reputation at this point.
"They are much stingier than you might think. The true award amounts are much smaller than they would like the world to believe. It varies substantially depending on the impact the team and the individual have had, and it can be anywhere from $20K to $100K, with the occasional $1M reportedly given to very senior employees (e.g. the team's director). The awards are typically paid as RSUs and vest over 4 or 5 years."
i.e. not much makes it past the layers of VPs, directors, and front-line managers (all of whom like money very much) to the people who actually made it happen.