Aakash Gupta

Sundar Pichai has added $1.11T to Google’s market cap.

His counter-intuitive advice? “You have to reward effort, not outcomes”

It’s basically heresy. “Outcomes, not output” is THE mantra amongst product leaders and books like Inspired. Why is Sundar, a former PM himself, praising efforts over outcomes?

1. Google’s Increased Conservatism
2. What You Can Control
3. The Pendulum Swung Too Far

1. Google’s Increased Conservatism
When Sundar joined Google in 2004, it was very different from when he became CEO in 2015. In 2004, people believed any problem could be solved. And the reward structures were built such that they felt they should try to.

By 2015, Google was not a young unprofitable startup pursuing aspirational bets. It was a conservative profit machine focused on growing its great businesses. This meant folks were not taking the same big, low probability bets Google needed.

The company needed to reward the effort involved with these low probability outcomes.

This made rewarding effort, not output, the solution. The Google advice need not apply in situations where people are risk-taking. But it does in conservative environments.

2. What You Can Control
You can’t control outcomes. You can control outputs. You can control your effort and attitude, learning and quality of features. Outcome focus rewards the lucky and punishes the unlucky.

3. The Pendulum Swung Too Far
Google is famous for its use of OKRs to set goals & evaluate product teams. This approach completely ruled out outputs to focus on outcomes. But it had the result of penalizing good product teams in bad markets. It needed to come to the middle.

In summary, Google is zigging where others are zagging. It’s focusing on outputs and effort, not just outcomes. Consider if you should too.

Everything you need to know about Twitter's algorithm:

🚨 Airbnb just eliminated its traditional product management function.

This is one of the boldest experiments in Product Management we have seen in quite some time.

→ Who’s going to own the roadmap?
→ Who will cross-functional teams collaborate with?
→ Who will be responsible for writing the team’s charter, focus problems, and metrics?

Brian has been posting Twitter threads of each of Airbnb’s two most recent product releases. So it sounds like the executives are re-taking over the roadmap.

And, presumably, engineering managers and designers will split the other tasks. It will be an interesting experiment to watch.

The crowd erupted in applause. Is there something broken with today’s product management? What do you think of the change?