At Google the joke was that 20% time was really 120% time since you still had to do your day job. I never personally saw a 20% time project turn into a product and I never felt comfortable taking 20% time. However, I did feel comfortable taking on what I saw as important work but which wasn't part of my job description --training myself up on it and becoming the go-to person for that work.
That part of the culture WAS consciously cultivated and I found it very valuable. It drew me up and made me more than I was. It was bound up with a culture of open sharing of ideas and cross-training. A notion that you could find compelling work at the company and shift your focus to that work/team.
There was also an effort to encourage new projects and ideas but they didn't go far enough. If I could give one piece of advice it's to create explicit approval and some serious financial incentives for people who start new products at your company. Treat projects like this in the way you'd treat an acquisition of the company making that product. E.G. if your company adopts a side project as a product, give the creators cash, respect, authority, and support to grow it into something great.
To be fair, 20% doesn't have to be a shipping product. I've had coworkers work on things like recruiting projects (running a puzzle/coding competition that ran on campuses around the US), employee resource groups, internal dashboards for various metrics relevant to employees, morale things like massive holiday lighting decorations around campus, and so on with 20% time. Those have all been very real things that contribute to company culture and morale and have "shipped" even if not to customers.
I worked at a different company that had implemented a similar policy (10% I think?), and generally the problem was the same. There was no process to formally accept projects, and no formalized way of having managers ignore the productivity loss when evaluating people.
I suspect the management liked the concept of having their smart engineers invent new products, but ultimately preferred buying companies. It somehow seemed less risky even though most of the acquisitions failed.
I'm not a Googler but wasn't Gmail a 20% project? (And maybe other Google products that I don't know?)
It seems to me that it would be entirely worth it to Google if 99.99% of 20% projects don't go anywhere, but every now and then, you get a big hit like Gmail whose newfound revenue completely eclipses the lost 20% experimental time from the 9999 other employees.
And even for those 9999 other employees, even if their 20% projects don't go anywhere, they are likely still hugely educational in ways that would make them more productive in the other 80%.
Well, Paul built Gmail in a day, by layering it on top of Groups, and that's 20% of a week, so I guess technically, yes, it was a 20% project? How it came about, though, is more that Paul had been working on email for many years before Google, then the execs decided people needed to be working on more important impactful projects, and Paul suggested he try to build email.
It's important to remember the difference between the old Google with ~1k people and today's Google with 100k+ people. Things were a lot more flexible back when gmail was a new thing.
I started at G in 2005 when there were 6k engineers, but it was doubling every 9-12 months. You could watch the ossification in real time.
My experience was definitely one of 120% time. Some people made 20% projects actually work, but that became more rare over time.
> [...] they asked me if I wanted to build some type of email or personalization product. It was a pretty non-specific project charter. They just said, “We think this is an interest area.” Of course, I was excited to work on that.
That part of the culture WAS consciously cultivated and I found it very valuable. It drew me up and made me more than I was. It was bound up with a culture of open sharing of ideas and cross-training. A notion that you could find compelling work at the company and shift your focus to that work/team.
There was also an effort to encourage new projects and ideas but they didn't go far enough. If I could give one piece of advice it's to create explicit approval and some serious financial incentives for people who start new products at your company. Treat projects like this in the way you'd treat an acquisition of the company making that product. E.G. if your company adopts a side project as a product, give the creators cash, respect, authority, and support to grow it into something great.