The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Ideas Are Cheap; Buildable Plans Win Reviews

Senior leaders are paid not for the insight that points at action, but for the plan a hundred people can actually execute.

I do think your ideation is fantastic and valuable to Google. The deck shows you have definitely put a bunch of time into thinking Jedi++ through and laying out challenges & opportunities, and you have a strong vision for a positive end state. That said, I expected the supporting data, level of organization in the argument, and the depth of forward planning to be significantly further along six weeks after the strat summit and the big dinner with Eisar where Jedi++ was coined. I have found over the years however that new projects on the right track get the foundational thinking out well in advance, and are pretty well structured by the time they're in the last week of prep. I recognize that is a pretty high bar, but senior product leaders at Google are expected to go beyond the analysis / insights that suggest action, and craft the actionable plans that big teams can get on board with and have impact in the market. I would recommend really clearing your decks of everything external facing and non-essential internal between now and the review, and put the time into the core PM'ing work here — grinding out the data to back up the Jedi++ story, organizing and consolidating the ideas about what to do next into a few internally consistent, buildable options; co-planning with Jim about how this could actually get to market in 2017; and especially vetting this extensively with cross-functional teams so their views are taken into account.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Trial Ex. PTX1543 — DOJ public archive
October 17, 2016
Public domain
View the primary source →