This paper examines Google Glass as a case study in hardware innovation and product design within Google's pioneering innovation framework. It explores how Google's "rule of 20%" and user-centered design philosophy shaped the development process, the critical role of lead industrial designer Isabel Olsen in transforming an early prototype into a viable product, and the factors that limited commercial adoption. The analysis concludes that Google Glass's path to success lies in enterprise and vertical market applications rather than mainstream consumer adoption.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a global leader in online search, online and contextual advertising, mobile operating system and application development, and enterprise application platform services. The advertising businesses serve as the catalyst for Google's revenue growth, contributing nearly thirty percent of profits or more in any given financial reporting period. Another integral part of Google's unique corporate culture is the focus on continual internal innovation and services and product development.
From its inception, the company has strived to create a culture of continuous innovation by establishing the "rule of 20%," which gives engineers one day a week to work on projects of their choosing. This freedom to create and see products and services become commercially viable drives 57% to 60% of revenue in any given financial period. Google's latest series of successes has been in the area of mobile operating systems for mobile devices. The Google Android operating system now dominates smartphone and tablet sales, surpassing all Apple iOS-based devices by a significant margin in unit sales and nearly eclipsing the dollar amount of sales throughout 2014.
The success of the Android operating system and independent software vendor (ISV) programs led the company to scale back its investments in the Motorola acquisition made in 2011 and the eventual sale to Lenovo in January 2014. The short-lived ownership of Motorola and the rapid success of Android illustrate just how successfully Google manages to expand platforms and technologies to extend its core business—search and advertising—compared to managing diverse business models that Motorola would have required. The Android operating system is designed to streamline web access across multiple devices, is offered free to developers and at a modest fee for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and has one of the most robust developer relations teams in the mobile operating system industry. With nearly 60% of revenue attributable to products and services generated as a result of internal innovation efforts, Google's senior management teams invest a significant amount of their time excelling in this area of leadership.
Google Glass, the innovative new headset that provides real-time web and contextual search and compatibility with existing Android Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), began as an internal innovation project within Google. Typical innovation projects within Google are web-centric and rarely include hardware, circuitry, or the use of the Android operating system as an integrative technology across hardware components. Google Glass represents a departure from how Google has created the majority of its core services, including Gmail, AdSense, the highly successful free Google Analytics, and continual updates to AdWords, which enables any business to inexpensively advertise on Google.
Google Glass symbolizes how intensively focused Google is on the innovation imperative, with the decision to transcend the traditional boundaries of internal new product or service ideas and adopt one that includes hardware integration based on the Android operating system platform. The integration of these components and the corresponding requirements on the Google supply chain, quality management standards, and requirements for greater support across all phases of the company's value chain further demonstrates how far Google is willing to push itself internally to innovate. This deviation from a software-based approach to new product and service development also led the company to invest in chipmakers to drive down the total cost of Google Glass. Google's commitment to growth through innovation engrains their processes for new product and service development deep into the DNA of their business model.
Google's rule of 20% is so pervasive that engineers apply to Google just to gain the opportunity to create new products and services for the company. What is so alluring to the world's brightest engineers about Google's innovative-driven culture is the opportunity to move beyond the boundaries of a typical development engineering role and see their ideas and concepts transformed quickly into reality. Google provides engineers with the autonomy to pursue their own product or service ideas, the opportunity to master their specific areas of expertise, and a strong sense of purpose to transform their ideas into new products and services quickly.
In short, Google's senior management is acutely aware that long-term motivation is predicated on the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and strives to create a culture where these values, along with a "fail fast" mentality over new product development, pervade the mindset of the entire company. These are the foundational elements of how Google creates a culture of innovation. Marissa Mayer, former Vice President of Product Management at Google and later President and CEO of Yahoo, was often interviewed about the innovation approach used at Google and provided frameworks that she and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin found effective in fostering a continual culture of innovation and new product ideas.
The formula or framework Marissa Mayer often shared is as follows: smart, talented people in their specific fields plus a creative, agile environment plus a continual outlet for new ideas and validation of concepts equals innovation. This simple equation became the foundation for how all Google teams are structured. With the Google Glass team specifically, Google's senior management strove for an exceptionally flat organizational structure to increase communication and collaboration. This is evident in how the team was structured initially and how Google senior management kept the team at a minimum to encourage greater collaboration and idea sharing.
The key leaders of the development team included Isabel Olsen, lead industrial designer, who is credited with transforming the streamlined final design from the initial, very clunky prototype. She took a de facto leadership role throughout the entire project and brought lightness, simplicity, and scalability as design goals to the project. A core part of the innovation culture at Google is to place user-centered design at the center of all efforts, which translates into building products that meet and exceed people's needs while enhancing their quality of life. The design team also included Charles Mendes, software development lead, and Steve Lee, Product Director. These three Google engineers formed the catalyst of the initial Google Glass team and were provided engineering assistance when needed for software development and coding work.
The company offers all teams up to nine software engineers as part of their project charters, and Google Glass used only several during the initial software development phases. The majority of the initial prototyping was done by Isabel Olsen, lead industrial designer. Google has found that smaller teams with a compelling project are more effective than having tens or hundreds of engineers on a project, which often becomes unwieldy over time and loses focus.
Collaboration and communication are designed into the Google new product development process, as the company has found that small, fast-moving teams can outperform larger, more complex organizational structures. For any project to survive at Google, there must be communication, collaboration, and the sharing of concepts and ideas. Based on these requirements, Google has refined a specific new product development process that guides their rule of 20% investment of engineer's time.
To initiate the new product development or innovation process, Google first accepts ideas from everywhere in the company, with specific focus on engineering and product development teams. Engineers are encouraged to invest a day a week in new product ideas, regardless of their scope, scale, or potential cost. Google's expansive product and services portfolio is evidence of how effective this strategy is. Marissa Mayer has noted that Google's greatest critics are often actually the best source of new product ideas as well.
Second, engineering and business development managers compile all new ideas, comparing them with currently funded projects and ongoing maintenance efforts. The management teams assign attributes and rank to each item in the list, using the decision point of whether a given new product will increase user retention and reduce churn. Next, each idea is rank-ordered in terms of risk, with a five being a great idea yet with less risk and a four being exciting as an innovation yet very risky. Only projects that have aggregate scores of four and five are assigned an initial team (often the engineers who propose the idea) and given access to up to nine software engineers for a specific period of time to complete the project.
Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are passionate believers in the small engineering team concept, as they have seen exceptional scale, speed, and results based on this approach to development. Once a team is formed, there is heavy emphasis on self-organization and visibility of the entire new product development process. The company calls the project team's charter and schedule "sparrow" pages internally, which shows in real-time daily progress on the project. Also included are "snippets," as they are called internally, that provide updates on the latest developments on the project and often include code modules in larger projects.
User-centered design is such a strong element in the design process that teams are assigned a senior-level industrial designer who often becomes the de facto leader, as user-centered design frequently takes precedence over technical limitations. User-centered design requirements of the development team center on completing a minimum of one user study a week, a clear focus on quality of the user experience and development, and rapid iteration of design elements. As Google is tightly aligned with Stanford University, many user studies are completed there.
Once a project is approved, one of the three core team members assigned is a senior-level industrial designer. As user-centered design is a critical success factor for all Google projects, this person often is the de facto leader and most politically powerful member of the team. It is common for the senior industrial designers to have master's degrees in human-computer studies or ergonomics when assigned to projects that have significant risk. This was the case with Google Glass, which was assigned Isabel Olsen, lead industrial designer. As her decisions regarding user experience and user design form the constraints that software engineering (led by Charles Mendes) and product design including project management (led by Steve Lee) must adhere to, she defines the current and future roadmap for the Google Glass product line.
Isabel Olsen has noted that the initial product prototype looked like a "phone attached to a scuba mask." She immediately redefined the design objectives of Google Glass away from the purely functional to emphasize lightness, simplicity, and scalability. These three design objectives in turn drove multiple iterations of user design sessions and the continual refinement of the product concept. Isabel Olsen also immediately recognized that Google entering the wearable technology arena was fraught with risk. She set design parameters ensuring Google Glass would have an intuitive, immediate, and responsive user experience that could easily be modified to the user's specific needs.
She states that taking a "reductionist" approach to development is what led to the success of the design overall. The final Google Glass design is in large part due to her influence and leadership of the development team's efforts at delivering a more effective and valuable user experience. In conclusion, Google Glass would not have survived and become a viable product without the leadership and design vision of Isabel Olsen as Lead Industrial Designer.
"Unmet sales forecasts and consumer adoption barriers"
"Vertical market focus as path to sustainable growth"
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