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One of the things I was worried about when joining
Google, was how the work model was going to take place.
I had previously worked in small companies where
everything was very bottom-up, everything was basically
driven by individuals, and you could just get stuff going and
get a product iterated, and get feedback instantly.
And I was really worried when joining Google that I would
have to go through a substantial amount of upfront
design review and upfront product review, and it turned
out not to be the case at all.
I've been working on a product recently, which is basically
trying to make Google Talk accessible to more people than
are currently able to use it, since you can skip a lot of
the registration steps.
And instead of having to go through a huge amount of
product reviews early on, or having to go through a lot of
launch issues early on, I was able to basically do a
prototype and come up with an initial design.
And I have people pick holes in it and make it a better
product and better design in the first place, and just keep
on iterating and getting feedback as I went along.
For me, I really enjoyed having the sort of tangible
process where I get the best product possible, but also can
get it up and running quickly.
And we can decide early on, hey, that's not working, maybe
we should just kill it.
Or we could decide, hey, this is really great, let's put
some more resources behind it and let's
really make it a product.
My name is Chris [? Bensel. ?]
I'm a software engineer in the Seattle office.