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Marissa Mayer: Yahoo Products Must Ship In 6 Months, Or Don't Bother
- alphazulu 14y agoFor some reason Marissa reminds me of the King in that Bugs Bunny cartoon. "Where's my Hasenpfeffer!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDe8fTgVUZw&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDe8fTgVUZw&feature=youtu...
- dmishe 14y agoThat's the spirit
- snowmaker 14y agoDoes anyone have a link to a more detailed summary of her turnaround plan?
- ricksta 14y agoanyone felt 6 month is kinda long? I guess it depend on the type of product, but wasn't the first version of Gmail written in a day?
- boyter 14y agoI'd say most projects can be knocked together to a basic proof of concept in a day. However getting it to be able to support 100 million users (as per the article), or even be worth showing takes a lot longer then that.
- msbarnett 14y agoThe prototype, perhaps. Not the version that initially shipped.
- sdoowpilihp 14y agoKeep in mind that is the outer bounds. I am sure no one would complain If a team delivered a quality product in some fraction of that six months time period. Even more, though six months sounds like an eternity to a startup with 7 months of "financial runway", for teams used to the bureaucratic pace of yahoo, 6 months is likely considered to be breakneck.
- verelo 14y agoThe first "version" could be the wrong term. I'd be asking how long did it take for the first "user facing version" to be produced. I imagine 6 months isnt far off, maybe less but it would be a very restricted beta.
- jkubicek 14y agoPeople seem to be misinterpreting her comments. The product will ship in 6 months and reach 100M users eventually.
- pbiggar 14y agoIt seems almost willful, doesn't it?
- dawernik 14y agoPoint is, time to deliver will matter... And stop doing the inconsequential many... How can anyone argue against that? Wonder when the first big reorg/cut happens, that will be when you get a true sense of where they are going.
- programminggeek 14y agoThis I think is a good rule for Yahoo! You need to have a real product in the market to get users. Pre announcements don't drive engagement, usage, revenue, or advertising sales. Eyeballs do. Users do. Also, the it needs to be a product that could reach 100 million users or $100 million dollars is a great filter. It provides focus. Unfortunately, based on the last 10 years of Yahoo's corporate history, there are probably a lot of bad habits and corporate culture shenanigans that will need to be dealt with before Yahoo's actions match their CEO's marching orders. At least Yahoo is trying to do something hopefully more interesting than being another internet media company held over from the AOL era of the internet. Perhaps soon someone at Yahoo! will be able to clearly explain what Yahoo! is and does.
- arthurrr 14y agoI don't see the point of this rule. It seems like it would instill fear, and cause hesitation and second guessing. But I don't like rules in general, I prefer having philosophies. Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside. There seems to be much adoration on HN for anything Marissa Mayer says. I watched a few interviews of her, she has an uncomfortable personality, hard to listen to imo.
- EwanToo 14y agoTo me it would inspire ambition, not fear, but I guess it depends on the listener. If you work at Yahoo (or Google, or Facebook), and the product you want to work on ins't going to affect 100 million users, then you should probably be working somewhere else, it's simply the nature of their businesses.
- nhangen 14y agoIf only it were that easy to create massively successful software.
- EwanToo 14y agoIt's not meant to be easy, and it never will be, but it has to be the goal. If you want to make niche software, Yahoo is not the place to go it, anymore than Unilever is the place for people who want to make small amounts of high qualty hand made soaps.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pjy04 14y agoGreat leadership. Simple rules to follow for a big org. Product managers are now on notice
- codeonfire 14y ago"You ate the food! no one made you eat the food! but you did, so now where's our $100 million dollars?" Really if you want big $100 million dollar wins you had better make with big million dollar rewards for the people delivering. That is impossible because the management bureaucracy will soak that right up. Yahoo should focus on rewarding the right people through acquisitions and investments.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI keep looking at this comment and wondering who "the right people" are. Do you mean buying outside talent, by aqui-hiring? Or dumping a million dollars on random developers within the company?
- codeonfire 14y agoI suggested acquisitions and investment in outside companies that are on track to create a $100 million product within six months but are maybe undervalued by the market. They need to look for situations where there aren't six layers of management to soak up all the rewards. I've never heard of a company dumping millions of dollars on random developers and I don't think that's possible. They may dump millions of dollars on a VP, but by the time it "trickles down" through all the layers to the team it comes out as "you're lucky to have a job." So in almost all instances it's telling people to kill themselves to launch a $100 million dollar product in six months just so they can keep their jobs (with free food of course). Those people are going to take option 2, quit and go somewhere else, and the product will never launch.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoThe goal of $100 million isn't that Yahoo wants money. They want to be a sexy, ambitious, developer-oriented employer like Google. They want to experiment, and break things, and most importantly identify what is and isn't working. Rather than letting some cut-rate dev produce a middling Japanese Finance page for his whole career, they want a few impressive brands that will draw new, talented developers in. Free food is part of that branding as well. Buying a promising startup and smothering it with their existing bureaucracy would only hurt their reputation at this point.
- confluence 14y ago> Don't just do something, stand there. -- Dr Linda Lewis (Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons) Google has been working on their automatic car tech for ~5 years. Amazon has been working on the kindle line for ~7 years. Google's project glass took ~4 years and they've been working on social for ~3 years. SpaceX on the falcon for ~5 years and Tesla Motors on the roadster for ~7 years. Sometimes the better thing to do is quite literally do nothing before you go pull off a Nokia like move (sucking up to the losing horse in mobile) or the like. That doesn't mean pull a RIMM either. This kind of thinking isn't very good because it completely disregards the uncertainty present in product development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doctors_Think#Disregard_of_uncertainty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doctors_Think#Disregard_of_...).
- pbiggar 14y agoAll of the products you list are hardware, which doesn't count. The only exception is Google's social stuff; Google had shipped many social products to get where they are today including Gmail, GTalk, Orkut and Buzz. They didn't sit in their offices and build Google Plus for 10 years, they iterated again and again, and that's what Mayer is asking for.
- confluence 14y agoGames/Music/Hardware/Software always iterate to completion - the web isn't special in terms of this. The key component is and will remain time to search through a product space to where you can actually add value.
- shashashasha 14y agoWhat pbiggar is saying is that hardware doesn't make sense to measure on the same timescale as software, not that it doesn't involve iteration. Think about the "time to ship" of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc and you start to see numbers closer to or within the 6 month time range.
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- Tichy 14y agoFree food, eh? Sounds like a great place to work.
- gothy 14y agoBest decision ever.
- Zenst 14y agoProbably a very good move in that with talent, sometimes you have to box it in so it can break out. Hopefully this blanket rule appraoch will restore focus.
- rickmode 14y agoI'm surprised by the negative comments here. The idea of shipping a minimum viable product should resonate well with startup-minded folks. I believe PG himself once said if your project will take longer than 3 months to ship, it's too long. 6 months is a good target. It'll keep new projects lean and focused. It should sway the balance of power more to engineering while forcing the business-side / product management to work tightly with engineering... Or force the product managers to take a back seat for the initial release of a project.
- duaneb 14y agoA startup spending their first three years without shipping a product ("shipping") would be more of a problem than something with Yahoo's stability making something over several years. The risk is much, much lower.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoEventually it is not. Eventually your products, your development capacity and feel for the customers needs now is so out of touch, you cannot get back.
- nhangen 14y agoIt's not the idea of shipping in six months, it's the idea of shipping something (in six months0 that will be adopted by millions of users. We don't have the full context of her statement, and I'm guessing (hoping) that she isn't expecting version 1 to be a runaway success, but will allow the team to continue iterating and pivoting, if necessary, before making the determination of whether the project was worthwhile.
- smoyer 14y agoI didn't read the quote that way and don't think it's unreasonable to launch an MVP in six months. The other two criteria are business cases against starting and are used to decide which projects should proceed towards their MVPs. When Google launches a beta (or even alpha), they watch for adoption and "hockey stick" growth. If a project gains traction, the MVP will be augmented with features during the 2-3 years it takes to reach 100M users or $100M.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThe 100 million user rule seems to eliminate any developer focused products like YUI, YQL, and Pipes.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoMaybe not if they allow indirect user counting. I'm sure that there are 100 million users that use websites that use YUI, for example.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoI'm sure it does, but if I'm working on a new developer product how do I make the case that it's the next YUI? I think these sort of line-in-the-sand rules lead to people erring on the side of not doing anything.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoThose sorts of estimates are easy. You just go "total market size" * "my potential penetration as a percent". Yahoo would have the numbers available for the former, and you guess the latter.
- jasonkolb 14y agoThis pretty much changed my view of her--it displays a lot of naiveté about how long it takes to develop software. I guess it depends on the market, but I'd be extremely skeptical about shipping any world-shaking software 6 months from beginning to write it. Assuming you allow at least a month for testing and debugging--which is EXTREMELY aggressive--that leaves just five months for planning and execution. For any kind of complex software you're looking at at least two or three weeks for planning, at a large company like Yahoo even a month seems very aggressive. So that leaves 4 months for development. You're going to lose at least a week to two weeks to meetings related to issues, work distribution, and so on. Assuming they're using Agile (if not, you have to allow for project planning meetings etc), and give them 1 month sprints to be generous, you're looking at about 3-4 iterations of the software before you ship. I just don't think this is realistic. It's a nice goal and a nice thought but unless they're building HTML 5 games or something and counting those as products it's just not realistic. But we shall see.
- forgotusername 14y agoI'm guessing you are very much her target audience, above are a bunch of traditional ideas about development that result in huge, drawn out processes for out of date designs that more often than not have some big omission missed during planning. In the meantime you've got a team so ingrained in how their project should work (after years of effort, probably forgotten what they're even building, lost in a world of type masturbation and implementing whatever cool tech they read about today, and demotivated because they've delivered F.A. in the meantime), regardless of its function, that pivoting the mess post-delivery is now impossible. Yahoo isn't exactly sending men to Mars, they're cobbling together fairly simplistic web apps to serve ads and perhaps even subscriptions that at best need a bit of fancy realtime communication or maybe a very large database in the background. For these kinds of apps and open source where it is now, you can get 'prototype one' built in about 90 minutes by one guy defining a bunch of models and a 0 byte index.html. Given a team of 3, one week is more than enough time to have a couple of buttons, some rough page layout, and most importantly an increasingly sterling idea of the problems you're going to start running into and how you need to adjust. It's called iterative software development, it's great. Now just add one PM to whip the software kids in the right direction, and you have a viable chance at delivering an internal demo in 2-3 months.
- photorized 14y agoThat approach will also make their acquisition or acqui-hire decisions easier. Based on recent press, they are supposedly setting aside a portion of their Alibaba proceeds for M&A. "Can we build this in 6 mos? No? Let's go ahead and buy then."
- duxup 14y agoI'm going to guess the rest of the all-hands meeting provided a bit more context and clarity.
- Evbn 14y agoEvery week this looks more like a stealth takeover by Google, with Mayer as an advance agent grooming Yahoo for assimilation. Or just some healthy spread of Google cukture across the industry.
- signalsignal 14y agoI'd wager on "beginning of the end". Shake up large projects until only the smaller, "quick wins" remain, then sell off the assets. It's easier that way from what I hear.