Marissa
Mayer Has a Secret Weapon
·
BY STEVEN LEVY
Everyone agrees that one of Marissa Mayer’s most urgent tasks at
Yahoo will be hiring great managers and product people. Yahoo’s talent pool has
been reduced to puddles, as the best techies have gone elsewhere and promising
newcomers have come down with colorblindness when it comes to purple.
Some people wonder whether even Mayer can lure back the brains.
It turns out, though,
that the new CEO has a unique advantage in fulfilling this quest. For the past
decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented
young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the
hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google
called Associate
Product Manager (APM).
Mayer invented this program, led it and never gave it up. It was
a key part of her tenure at Google. And now she may reap some benefits.
Don’t be fooled by the modest title, prefixed by that timid word
“associate.” The most coveted entry post at Google is spelled APM. This is an
incubation system for tech rock stars. “The APM program is one of our core
values — I’d like to think of one of them as the eventual CEO of the company,”
Google’s Executive Chair Eric Schmidt once told me.
Consider the first APM, a fresh Stanford grad named Brian
Rakowski. He became a key leader of the team that built the Chrome browser and
now is the VP of the Chrome operation. The second was Wesley Chan, who made
Google Toolbar a success, then launched Google Analytics and Google Voice. He’s
now picking winners for Google Ventures. Another early APM was Bret Taylor, who
earned his bones by launching Google Maps. He left Google and co-founded
Friendfeed, then become the Chief Technical Officer of Facebook.
Though not all APMs achieve such glory, they are generally
recognized as elite. At any given time at Google, there are over 40 APMs active
in the two-year program. And since Google has been hiring them since the early
2000s there are over 300 who have been through the program.
And the glue to the whole shebang was Marissa Mayer, who was the
APM boss, mentor, den mother and role model.
Mayer thought up the program in early 2002. Google had been
struggling to find PMs who could work within the peculiar company culture —
team leaders who would not be bosses but work consensually with the
wizards who produce code. Ideally, a Google product manger would
understand the technical issues and sway the team to his or her viewpoint by
strong data-backed arguments, and more than a bit of canny psychology. But
experienced PMs from places like Microsoft, or those with MBAs, didn’t
understand the Google way, and tried to force their views on teams.
So Mayer came up with an idea: Google would hire computer
science majors who just graduated or had been in the workplace fewer than 18
months. The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total
programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense.
Essentially they would be in-house entrepreneurs. They would undergo a
multi-interview hiring process that made the Harvard admissions regimen look
like community college. The chosen ones were thrown into deep water, heading
real, important product teams. (As the first APM, Rakowski was asked to launch
a nascent project called Gmail. By the way, I hear Rakowski is taking over the
program now that Mayer is gone.) “We give them way too much responsibility,”
Mayer once told me, “to see if they can handle it.” Also, Google had APMs
perform tasks for top management, like note-taking at high-level executive
meetings or drawing up white papers on ambitious potential products.
The program has a been massive success, with APMs filling key
roles in dozens of key Google products, ranging from apps to search to ads. The
program has been so successful that Google has created a variation for leaders
of non-product teams. These are called Marketing APMs. Though not quite as
prestigious as APMs, these Googlers are not exactly chopped liver. For
instance, Kevin Systrom was an MAPM — before he left Google and founded
Instagram.
The one constant in
the program has been Mayer. Her staff ran the program, and continued to do so,
even after she moved from heading search products to local services in 2011.
You didn’t get to be an APM unless you connected with her; she was the last
interview in a long series, and she’d typically make ultimate decision. (“Tell
me about a product you love,” she’d ask candidates. There was no right answer.
But not describing the choice with passionwas the wrong answer.)
Once you become an APM, Mayer was available as mentor and
counselor. She made time in her insanely busy schedule to meet. She worked
behind the scenes to address any issues that arose.
Halfway through the
two-year program, Mayer herself would lead the group on a summer trip to visit
international Google outposts. (I accompanied
the trip in 2007; we went to Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, and Tel
Aviv. This year, one of the cities included Jakarta.) It would be a bonding
experience for each year’s group of APMs — bonding with each other and to
Mayer.
Many, if not most, of the APMs keep in touch with Mayer after
they graduate from the program, meeting with her periodically for a career
check, and consulting with her when they considered a move. This occurs even
after APMs leave Google. (It’s not surprising that a high percentage of APMs go
elsewhere. APMs are chosen for their ambition and independence. Those traits
are often at odds with working at a big company.)
In short, Marissa
Mayer has developed a deep connection to over three hundred of most talented
tech people in Silicon Valley. They may still be at Google, they may have moved
to companies like Facebook or Dropbox, or they may have started their own
budding enterprises like Optimizely.
But in some sense they are all Marissa’s acolytes.
It would be not be
surprising if some of these baccalaureate APMs wind up at Yahoo. In addition,
former APMs all have their own networks, and can tip off Mayer
to promising hires. Naturally, one of the first e-mails that Mayer sent after
accepting her new job was a blast to the entire APM network, informing them of
her move and assuring them that she will still be in touch. She reminded them
that they are all part of a very special family.
And Mayer would presumably be happy to welcome some of these
family members to her new home at Yahoo.
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