 "Marissa Mayer")
MARISSA MAYER AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE YAHOO!
Authors: Nicholas Carlson
Publisher: Hachette
Price: Rs 599
ISBN: 9781444789898
All of the Yahoo CEOs prior to 2012 believed their job was to conceive of a strategy, or perhaps just approve one thought up by their lieutenants, and then make sure the right people in the company were empowered to execute the plan.
That was not how Marissa Mayer did things. Not since the days of Jeff Mallett had Yahoo seen such an energetic, command-and-control leader as Marissa Mayer. She was the CEO who, on her first day on the job, set up her computer for coding. Before Mayer went to a single high-level financial, business, or strategic review, she started going to product reviews and running them like she did at Google for thirteen years.
The first Daily Habit to get her full attention was Yahoo Mail. It was arguably Yahoo's most important product. For one, it was massive. In August 2012, thirty billion emails a day passed through Yahoo Mail - 350,000 every second. Six hundred million images traveled through the system every day, 250 times more than the number of photos uploaded to Yahoo's Flickr. For another, Yahoo Mail was a product that fed traffic to other products in the Yahoo network of sites. Some people inside Yahoo believed the only reason anyone ever came to the Yahoo home page was because they thought that was the only way to get to Yahoo Mail. There were stats to back the theory up: Four out of every ten people who visited the Yahoo home page next clicked on a link to Yahoo Mail.
When Mayer arrived at Yahoo in July, the GM for Yahoo Mail, Vivek Sharma, told her that Ross Levinsohn had approved a plan to relaunch Mail on four platforms: the web, iOS, Android, and Windows 8. The project was code-named Quattro Launch. The target release date was the first quarter of 2013, or the last quarter of 2012 if possible. Mayer told him to have the relaunch done by December.
This was an ambitious deadline. The last time Yahoo rebuilt webmail, in 2010, the project took eighteen months. Now Mayer was asking Sharma to accomplish as much in a third the time.
Actually, she was asking him to do more. In 2010, Yahoo didn't truly build mail apps for Android and iOS. It just made it so that the Yahoo Mail website was usable on smaller, mobile screens. This time, Yahoo was going to make apps, and Mayer was going to be picky about their quality.
When Sharma showed Mayer the first, early version of the iPhone app, she stopped him and said, "Vivek, why is it so jerky?"
The answer was that it was a "hybrid app." It wasn't fully built out on iOS. The app was basically a web browser that loaded the mobile version of the Yahoo Mail website. Hybrid apps weren't as slick or usable as apps built specifically for Android or iOS, but they were much easier and faster to make. Mayer scuttled those plans and commanded Sharma to start working on "native" apps for both Android and iOS.
Whereas Yahoo CEOs in prior years would have given Sharma his orders and then backed off, Mayer dove in.
By September, she was meeting with his team three times a week in a conference room that started to look more like a design studio. Windows ran down one side of the room. On the other side, projectors hung from the ceiling, rendering screens on the wall. Between the projections stood twenty or thirty huge pieces of foam core pinned up with a collection of ideas about what a new Yahoo Mail could look like.
Whereas CEOs in the past would have, on their rare visits with product teams, restricted their questioning to only the most senior leaders in the room, Mayer would grill everyone present on the finest details of the product's look and user experience. It was a level of energized scrutiny none of the people on the Mail team were used to. It was bracing and intimidating. Some of the people in the room were growing frustrated with the pace, but eventually, as the weeks wore on, others began contributing. Mayer learned whom to trust. Those trusted people began to grow in confidence, and they started to contribute even more.
One day during the fall of 2012, a member of the team named Dave McDowell found himself sitting next to Mayer in one of the thrice-weekly reviews. After minimal pleasantries, Mayer asked a question about the topic that was most important to her: the path users would take as they used the product, their "dickstream."
McDowell had an answer for her. Then she had another question. He had an answer. Another question. For forty-five minutes, Mayer and McDowell were eyeball to eyeball as she grilled him on clickstream data. From across the room, where Vivek Sharma sat, it felt like McDowell was getting hit by a fire hose. But in the weeks after that long test, Mayer's relationship with McDowell visibly changed. He had passed a test.
Once the Yahoos learned to operate on Mayer's level of intensity, the meetings became more interactive and warmer. The atmosphere lightened. Jokes started to fly around. This was Mayer in her ultimate element, the tough professor leading a seminar on advanced product design.
She was pushing the pace as she had those late nights working on problems for Philosophy 160A. She was teaching, as she had three thousand Stanford undergraduates. She was creating, as she had those pompom routines twenty-five years before. She was using data to empathize with hundreds of millions of people all at once, as she had learned to do at Google.
By November, the Yahoo Mail team was working nights and weekends, racing to finish by the insane early-December deadline. Finally, the Mail team finished its work at the end of November. But then Yahoo learned another lesson about what makingproducts would be like with Marissa Mayer as CEO.
One day before the new Yahoo Mail was set to launch, Mayer called a meeting with CMO Kathy Savitt, Sharma, and the entire product and engineering leadership team - about ten people in total. They met in Phish Food.
| MEET THE AUTHOR |
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Nicholas Carlson is known for investigative reporting and has rewritten histories of Facebook, Twitter and Groupon. His books previous books include: The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography and The Cost of Winning: Tim Armstrong, Patch, And The Struggle To Save AOL
- Longform.org named The Cost of Winning the best long-form business story of 2013. The Truth About Marissa Mayer also won Digiday's award for Best Editorial Achievement of the year
Nicholas Carlson
chief correspondent, Business Insider
chief correspondent, Business Insider
Everyone settled in; Mayer dropped a bombshell. For months, it had been decided that the new Yahoo Mail's colors would be blue and gray. The thought was that users were going to be looking at Yahoo Mail on their phones all day long, so it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting colors possible. Mayer wanted to change the colors entirely - from blue and gray to purple and yellow. Sharma's body language shifted immediately. He looked deflated. He was going to have to tell his people the news. Changing the color of a product like Yahoo Mail was not easy. Some unlucky group of people were going to have to go and manually change the color in literally thousands of places - all while working under a deadline.
Sharma's team got the changes done, but there was fallout from Mayer's decision. The lead Yahoo Mail designer quit and went to Google. The lead engineer left and founded a startup. Sharma himself quit for a job at Disney.
Re-printed with permission from the publisher. Copyright @ Nicholas Carlson 2015. A John Murray imprint. All rights reserved
