- Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: How Google sets goals and measures success
Excerpt: "Google sets impossible bodacious goals…and then achieves them. The engineering mindset of solving the impossible problem is part of the culture instilled in every group at Google. Tough engineering problems don’t have obvious answers. You need to invent the solution, not just optimize something that exists. Every quarter every group at Google sets goals, called OKRs, for the next 90 days. Most big companies set annual goals like improving or growing something by x%, and then measure performance once a year. At Google a year is like a decade. Annual goals aren’t good enough. Set quarterly goals, set them at impossible levels, and then figure out how to achieve them. Measure progress every quarter and reward outstanding achievement."
(categories: google business management goals strategy )
- ongoing · Doing It Wrong
Quote: "The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on."
(categories: enterprise software business web web2.0 agile )
- Pinboard Blog
Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users, and we’re coming up on our two millionth bookmark. We store about a hundred gigabytes of crawled content. From one full-time employee, the site has ballooned to a staff of 1.5. We’ve expanded to fill two servers, one hosting the main site while the other performs certain onerous background tasks. And we’ve added piles and piles of features, including Twitter and Instapaper mirroring, better bulk editing, a mobile site, bookmarking by email, archiving, feeds, an API, and even a version of the site for the five Pinboard users who prefer to browse their bookmarks in Spanish.
(categories: bookmarks delicious del.icio.us pinboard entrepreneurship startup )