Google's 20% time policy let engineers work on passion projects aligned with the company's tech focus, not unrelated hobbies. Marissa Mayer's 2005 analysis found roughly half of products launched that year came from 20% time work, proving the policy drove innovation rather than killing productivity.
Give people a license to dream. Now, this is probably one of my favorite things that Google has done. Google never said, "Oh, you know, you can do this and you can do that." But Google allowed every engineer to work 20% of his or her time on things that they wanted to work on. Now, This has been talked about a lot and I think misreported many, many ways because it wasn't that you could just say every Friday, hey, I'm going to take off and work on something I like, flying my model airplane. It always had to do with around what Google was doing. So you would work on something that you were excited about, had to do around technology. It was also not as rigid as every Friday. And it turned out that it really wasn't 20% most of the time that you worked on these things. But what it was was a permission from the company to do things that were outside of the normal scope that you were doing. And when you start letting people, really smart people, do things that are outside of the scope that you want them to do, they actually come up with really, really cool stuff. And Google gave that license to dream, which is really key ingredients for innovation. In 2005, Marissa Mayer, who was at the time running the consumer products at at Google, was doing an analysis because people actually started to question this. 2005 was— Google was public for not very long, a year or so, half a year. There was starting to be a change in the organization. And it was like, well, it was 20%. How can we justify that? And Marissa looked at every product that was launched in the last 6 months of 2005. And it turned out that 50% of the products were built in the 20% time. So effectively, rather than saying you're losing 20% of your productivity, it ended up that the vast majority of products were actually built during that time.
