Google turned periodic email updates as a process into a scalable management solution, leveraging technology, through automation, data storage and data retrieval. An individual’s Snippets are transparent across the organization and are linked to an individual’s internal resume in its MOMA system which connects individual employees to the work of team members and others within the company. It can kill political squabbles, the core problem of people management, by providing a record of what’s been done.
Put differently, Snippets is a management process that scales because transparency means that individual engineers can manage themselves and individual engineers can manage each other without having to go through a middleman. It’s the disruptive power of peer-to-peer for management centered around atomic units of work.
Silicon Valley’s focus of work around the work itself is still an ongoing competitive advantage. Compare it to the East Coast and you’ll see a stark contrast in the importance of dress and facetime at the office. Being work-centric means focusing manically on how to formulate process to eliminate all the cruft. Most engineers at Google, Zynga, Palantir, Square, etc. do often end up finding the process of Snippets and OKRs to be annoying and unnecessary — at the same time, many of them admit that they were their most productive when they closely tracked their Snippets and OKRs (objectives and key results) and that much of the autonomy and freedom that’s characteristic of top software engineering shops in the Valley could be attributed to Snippets doing its work of people management secretly, in silence.
For the multibillion dollar games company, Supercell, that takes the form of daily morning emails with details from project progress and revenue figures to help orient not just some top circle but every employee. CEO Ilkka Paananen explains: “If you provide people with the key information, you don’t need to tell people what to do, they can figure it out for themselves.
Buzzfeed also makes work details transparent, inspired by a process started at Google called “Snippets”. Everyone sends in an email with what they get done and what they need help with to keep moving. Since people can subscribe to each other’s updates, Snippets provides an at-a-glance view of what’s happening in the company.
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