Sublime

Every project at Google has a primary design doc. It is a living document, which means that it evolves alongside the project it describes. In its earliest form, a design doc describes the project’s objective, background, proposed team members, and proposed designs. During the early phase, the team works together to fill in the remaining relevant se

What Kenoros proposed to teach the 18 teams was a technique called Last Minute Implementation, and it scared the hell out of Tompkins. The scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle 40% or more of the project doing an elaborate, exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect one-to-one mappings t

Testers are essentially on loan to the product teams and are free to raise quality concerns and ask questions about functional areas that are missing tests or that exhibit unacceptable bug rates. Because we don’t report to the product teams, we can’t simply be told to get with the program. Our priorities are our own and they never waiver from relia

The idea was that, once they had done two or three projects for customers, they could take on an apprentice and mentor that person. We had younger people, and we had more women than other firms. We had Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams—two of the most senior people at the company were female, which was kind of unusual. We never wanted to have more than

Scott also kept his job as demo gatekeeper for Steve because he advanced work only when it was of sufficiently high quality.

This kind of collaboration was common. The programmers and designers on the Purple project were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We exchanged frequent feedback on our work, and all of us were expected to field questions on our specific area of development.