Google: Experiment Quickly and Often
Posted on November 25, 2005 Comments (10)
Google Thinks Small by Quentin Hardy, Forbes:
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Hundreds of projects go on at the same time. Most teams throw out new software in six weeks or less and look at how users respond hours later.
Google has advantages in making this work for them (it is easy to find reasons it won’t work elsewhere). However, this is basically piloting changes on a small scale, analyzing the results and doing that quickly and often. That quick, frequent experimentation is something organizations should strive to achieve.
The clear visible mission is also helpful. When an organization has an organizing principle everyone can understand then action can be guided by individual aim toward that purpose. When the understanding is missing organizations often have to rely on top down instruction and having far too many issues passed up the hierarchy for a decision.
And getting a small group of people to make things work quickly is also great. Many organizations get bogged down with byzantine management structures that slow action to a crawl.
Categories: Creativity, Data, Google, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, quote, Software Development
10 Responses to “Google: Experiment Quickly and Often”
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July 9th, 2006 @ 9:06 pm
[...] Google was driven from the beginning by engineers that sought to do what was best. Since those engineers were the founders of the company and still run the company Google has been able to keep the focus not on what is accepted as conventional wisdom but what actually works best. Google understands when you experiment things might not work our. Google’s solution is to experiment quickly and fail early (turn the pdsa cycle quickly). That is something every organization can apply. Still, Gartner analyst Ray Valdes believes Google retains an advantage in price-performance, as well as in overall computing power. [...]
March 18th, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
Experiments are useful and underused. PDSA and design of experiments are two concepts that aid in experimenting successfully…
April 7th, 2007 @ 9:53 am
it looks like an very easy way to do some simple multi-factorial experiments. Google offers a list of partners for those interested in consulting and more advanced features…
August 16th, 2007 @ 9:57 pm
Most companies have no way of just replacing their management system with a “Google management system” – they don’t have the managers to make it work, or the staff or the systems or maybe even the business…
October 27th, 2007 @ 11:25 am
Iteration is very important. It is important in proper use of the PDSA cycle – many quick iterations are much better than one long slow one. And for software application development it is an excellent strategy…
February 18th, 2008 @ 10:53 am
[...] Experimenting quickly and often (iteration) is extremely important and given far to little focus. The PDSA improvement cycle provides a tool to encourage such thinking but still few organizations practice rapid iteration. [...]
April 1st, 2008 @ 9:52 am
There are many reasons why avoiding risks is smart and should be encouraged. But when avoiding risks stifles innovation the risks to the organization are huge…
May 24th, 2009 @ 8:41 am
“Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations…”
August 17th, 2009 @ 10:18 am
[...] it provides big advantages to companies like Google that use concepts like design of experiments, experimenting quickly and often… while others don’t. Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment A few weeks [...]
August 17th, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
[...] be a bad idea; recommendations would confuse and/or distract people. Amazon, a company with a good culture of experimentation, decided to run a small experiment anyway, “just to get the data” – It was wildly [...]