Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
It&#x27;s hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off.<p>&gt; To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up a new project. The culture of “20% time” gives people permission to work on ideas outside of their primary role. There’s only the lightest of reviews needed to launch a “1% experiment.”<p>No, it is not super easy to start a new project. I&#x27;m in Google Cloud and we&#x27;re pretty focused on executing team priorities. I can suggest new work-streams and write arguments in their favor, sure. But I can&#x27;t just randomly add a feature or go away to work on a new product for a while. Every public thing in Cloud, at least, is carefully reviewed with a large checklist covering privacy, security, accessibility, API style, integration with existing systems like metrics, legal, etc. The simplest cloud service can take an extra six months or a year to get past these blocks. These requirements also apply to features. What we get for this is quality and consistency between products&#x2F;features.<p>And 20% time isn&#x27;t really a thing any more. You can get permission from your manager to work on something else, perhaps. But more likely this sort of thing is more like 120%. It&#x27;s not at all as lackadaisical as it&#x27;s presented to be. The most I see around my team is people volunteering for large-scale clean-ups. But these are more slack-time projects like 5% projects. It&#x27;s not totally gone however. I think the person who made Google Maps zoom out to a globe did it as 20% project, and I believe adding CitiBike support was similar as well.<p>We are also super careful about experiments. Every Google Search experiment has to go through a senior management review. In my team, every flag rollout is discussed and approved before rollout.<p>Insofar as these tidbits are presented as evidence for loose leadership, they don&#x27;t make sense. The ship is fairly tight, at least in Cloud.