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Google Product Development Process - Interesting facts

Marissa MayerEvelyn Rodriguez has prepared some interesting notes on the product development process at Google. These notes are from a presentation delivered by Marissa Mayer, a Google Product Manager.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the Google PDP document:

Google has offered free pizzas to Stanford students for participating in case studies.

Smart people PhD's ? + creative environment + outlet for ideas = innovation

Creative office design. Looks like mix between college campus and playground with toys. (Googleplex)

Original minimalist design because founder didn't really know HTML and did the simplest design.

Google News was written by one employee on a weekend after being frustrated trying to read news after Sept 11 event. Very soon, Googlers started to use it to read their news and then Google assigned 3 people (one was UI designer) and one PM to work on it

Continue strong ties to universities (especially Stanford). Also hire range of people with broad experience and non-traditional talents such as expert in Italian travel, machine learning, etc.

Ask user to find answer to a trivia question using the search engine and observe their interaction. They have an in-house user studies lab with a one-way mirror. Software that records mouse-clicks.

Download Google Product Development Process (pdf ~100kb)

Source: Why Google Is Going to Get There First [via]

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