Day 2: Speaking at Google

Stayed up late tuesday night working on slides for a half day at google . During the baychi talk, believe it or not, I came up with some changes I wanted to make. Didn’t get home from baychi till about 10:20pm, but was in bed before 1am.

Woke up early enough to get some exercise - I can be super cool presenter dude only if I get plenty of exercise. If I don’t exercise, the whole process of being a speaker isn’t as much fun - but If I exercise, I’m a buddhist monk (as in mellow and smiling deeply) through the whole process.

Scheduled to go on at google at 11am - Arrive early. Way early. 10:15am early. Drove around the outside of campus to see what else was in the neighborhood. I thought the campus looked familiar though I’ve never visited google before… then I saw that tall outdoor sculpture of a man - and realized it was the old Sgi campus!

Google campus has the vibe you’d expect - young, smart, and well financed. The architecture is fun. If you believe in the effect environment has on psychology, you’ll love this place. It’s stimulating and open- toys, games, volleyball court - it’s obvious the place is meant to be feel like an adult playground. And inside the buildings is much the same - big spaces, interesting shapes, open workspaces - little of the reptition and monotony found in most office buildings. (At first it reminded me of the blender, a Dr. Seus style incarnation of building A on Microsoft’s redwest campus that was remodeled into a conventional space years ago).

The talk was in a big open room in Building 43 - it felt like being inside a big piece of swiss cheese: the room was nearly triangular, with big holes leading out into other areas. The room has no doors - just two big wide slots for people to enter and leave - I’m pretty sure this was not the room they used to have their top secret uber-private conversations.

Carolyn Yates, my host, was great and showed me around, and got me set up. The tech folks were there and got me set up in 2 minutes. At 11:05, we got started. Had about 100 people there - and more showed up after we started. I remember there being a row of folks standing towards the back.

The talk was a special one - I didn’t do it elsewhere on the tour - it was about stuff I learned while working on web browsers during the first browser war. I talked about managing team size, process and specs not being evil, and the tradeoffs of business, engineering and customers. I think it fit with the issues I guessed Google was dealing with, and the audience responded well. They laughed at jokes, paid attention, and a good crowd stuck around for Q&A. Many of the questions were about Firefox, browser design and strategy, but about half were about project management and development. I should have mentioned that Adam Bosworth, currently a VP at google, was a key player in the early parts of the browser effort - they have a expert on many of these issues in their midsts.

In the afternoon I did a second section with a smaller group of project managers - the safe bet would have been to work from a set presentation, but I went informal - it was only 20 people - and I tried to build up something from questions. I’ve done this dozens of times and its usually more fun for everyone. But this session did not go well - they weren’t happy with it and I wasn’t either. The feedback I got was that more examples from my own experience would have been better - but I was afraid to focus on that as a former Microsoftie speaking on google turf - I thought it’d all be rejected if everything I said came from my war stories. So instead most of the conversation was flat, and never got into good back and forth riffs. ( If you were there, let me know what you thought - I can probably learn something). One question I should have asked, but didn’t, was whether these folks worked together or not - informal/dynamic sessions run much better if it’s an intact team, vs people in the same role in different parts of a organization.

I met several other google folks, and they were all great - asked good questions, were friendly and generous to me - But I didn’t catch nearly enough names, or business cards - a mistake I made many times on this first time solo author tour. If we met and talked, drop me a line.

I left google around 1:30pm - Just enough to time to head back to the hotel for a quick shower and something else to eat, and then off to Yahoo!

Posted in On Tour, On writing, The Art of PM book |