Craig is Director of Technology at Google

Gotta love Google's mission statement:

Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Easy for a large company to get distracted - do things that matter
relentless focus on the user - switching cost for search engines is low, so its a necessity
brilliant people have good ideas - hiring, perks, having their work get out in the world -- one hiring committee, keeps it consistent, pace and standards
-a creative environment helps
-we use process that works

The Process
#Ideas come from everywhere
##Good ideas and bad ideas
##Touchgraph as an example
#Design for users
##Delta force of UI experts that get involved at the beginning of the project
##Challenge of retaining simplicity while allowing easy access to the functionality
#Compile, discuss, prioritize
##Top 100 list of most important projects (actually about 230)
##Editable webpage like a wiki, Sparrow, for project ideas: ideas, rfps, pending, current projects and ended
##Product discussion forums (in person) every one to two weeks to distinguish good ideas from bad
##Then evaluate, using search traffic as an indicator for trends to address and use as an input for prioritization
#small teams are fast and agile
##design, code, test, launch plan, launch in one team
#communication is key
##downside to small teams is how you keep from splintering -- communication, broad and regular
##otherwise teams will only talk to teams that are close to them and create groups
##design process has wide circulation of idea at beginning
##new employees have to create readable code and communication
##the inter-team (10 of 3 people each) that oversee cross team communication, all volunteer positions
##tech talks, every week someone gets up and presents their project, archived on the intranet
#tools that organize
##editable page is suprisingly useful for communication, especially with search
##editable launch process form
##page that holds state for one week's worth of activity, e.g. engineering weekly report
##every employee writes at least a snippet per week
##internal blogs for communication, first thing that Pyra suggested when acquired (and why they realized they hired the right guys!)
#test, experiment, iterate
##first user study feedback: "I'm waiting for the rest of it" "is this some guys homepage" "are you from the psych department?"
##now a more formal testing model
##experiment with the labs page
##example iteration of GoogleNews

The web changes everything?

What makes this process work: hiring and technology. The web does change some things. Before web: no google, touchgraph style shared innovation, no internal communication like Sparrow, company structure would have required in person meetings and even a different structure, less feedback,