Last week at Webstock 2006, Rowan Simpson of Trademe made an excellent presentation on some inner secrets of Trademe's success in the NZ marketplace. Not long after I was listening to Rowan, I listened to a podcast from Marissa Mayer (mp3), VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google on nine ideas that Google feel have helped foster innovation and creativity within their business. Ideas which have ultimately contributed to their success. It was interesting to hear some of the ideas that they both spoke about, and it's obvious that intentionally or not, they have done some of the same things.
One factor that is obvious in both companies is their passion for making constant changes and improvements and letting their customers decide. They actually share the same technique in testing new changes (Google calls it "split AB testing", Rowan didn't say what Trademe calls it). Basically it means they serve up one choice to 50% of the users and the other choice to the other 50% and see which is more successful. The idea of failing fast or trying an idea and then seeing what the data says is really critical to both. They continually try new things just to see what will happen, and they do it in all areas.
Both are also religious about using numbers to make decisions. Marissa spoke in particular about having to reeducate people who joined Google about how they do presentations to senior management. In other firms, management often only want to know the conclusions, whereas at Google they really want to know the data - how many people they tested, what the results were when parameters were changed etc, etc. Marissa also felt that relying on data to make decisions meant that Google had less internal politics going on than other companies. Basically because people don't have to worry about their project getting chosen over someone else's on whether or not they have kissed up to the right person.
I think another area we can add is that both companies feel they can try their hand at many things, because since they are willing to make mistakes and then iterate, then they will ultimately succeed. For example, I asked Rowan why he thought Trademe could compete in the job board market in NZ (something they announced recently). His answer was pretty simple: "We started with Car Classifieds a couple of years ago and now we are number one, after that we set up Real Estate Classifieds and now we are number one. We are just working our way through the newspaper". Those sound like fighting words to me. Hope someone from Seek was in the audience.
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