In the Plex

Levy had unprecedented access to Google's inner workings — its engineers, its executives, its internal culture — and produced the definitive account of how the company actually operated during its formative decade. The book covers the development of search, the creation of AdWords, the launch of Gmail and Google Maps, the Android acquisition, and the company's confrontation with China, all told through the decisions and debates of the people involved. Levy is especially strong on Google's engineering culture: the reliance on data over intuition, the 20% time experiments, the hiring process designed to select for raw intelligence. Where other accounts traffic in myths, Levy provides mechanisms — how decisions were actually made, what was debated, what was ignored. For product leaders, it is an organizational case study of a company that scaled engineering-driven product development further than anyone before it. A natural complement to Levy's Hackers, which is already in this library.