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Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google

Eric Schmidt was brought in as the CEO of Google in 2001 and remained with Google in various leadership roles until 2020. He implemented the required structure and strategies to make Google what it is today. 

Schmidt sat down with Reid Hoffman for his “Blitzscaling” series back in 2015. “Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale.

Here are 4 lessons from his talk with Reid Hoffman.  

#1 Only small companies can be sheer force and no process 

Schmidt realized from day 1 that Google was Sergey and Larry’s company, not his. He knew they were the brains and the driving force behind the company, but that energy needed to be focused and directed. He provided structure to the chaos. A company can’t scale effectively if the structure isn’t in place.

#2 Teams should be small with strong leaders 

"The way you build great products is that you have small teams with strong leaders who obsess over trade-offs and they push things off. They say that we've got to get it done and put a lot of pressure on the team."

Much easier said than done, but the obsessive nature is a fine line that is walked by the best product leaders. The team leader needs to be able to elevate the team and focus their attention on the highest impact items. It’s easier to have a greater impact with smaller teams that can move quickly.

#3 Build for yourself 

"When you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them.”

Building for yourself has the ability to keep you motivated. What you are trying to fix should make your life easier. You should be best positioned to build something useful because you are the one who will be using it.

 #4 Don’t pre-scale 

"It is tempting to believe that you have a product that works before it works. The error that is made by non technical people is they believe what the engineers tell them and then they pre-scale for a product that doesn't work very well."

Product development should look like a tight funnel and that opens up to global expansion. Scaling earlier in the process can lead to failure. The product needs to be in a position where it can handle scaling.

Link to the video from Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman.

End Note

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Have a great day,

Nick