How Google Works
Source: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/eric-schmidt/how-google-works/9781455582341/ ↗
Schmidt and Rosenberg's account of how Google operated during its growth years — the specific structures, hiring practices, meeting formats and strategic moves that produced the company as it is.
The book is heavily branded but the operational material underneath is substantial, particularly the chapters on what the authors call "smart creatives" — the kind of people Google built its organisation to attract and retain.
For product direction it is a useful data point on one way to run a successful tech company at scale.
Read it selectively; the self-promotional parts are easy to skip, the structural parts are worth the time.
Central argument
Schmidt and Rosenberg argue that Google's success was not primarily the result of its products or technology, but of an organizational model deliberately designed to attract, retain, and unleash what they call 'smart creatives' — people who combine technical depth with business instinct and creative drive. The central thesis is that in an information-age company, the role of management is not to direct these people but to create the conditions — open information flows, flat structures, rapid iteration, and strategy built on technical insight — under which they can produce outsized results. Hiring, they contend, is the single highest-leverage activity a leader can perform, and most companies systematically underinvest in it.
Critique
The book's deepest limitation is that it cannot fully disentangle which practices caused Google's success and which were simply affordable because of its extraordinary early monopoly on search revenue — a moat that funded the organizational experiments Schmidt and Rosenberg describe as replicable best practices. The 'smart creative' model presupposes a talent market and compensation structure that only a handful of companies can access, making the prescriptions less portable than the authors acknowledge. There is also a notable absence of failure cases: the account is almost entirely a victory lap, which makes it difficult to stress-test the framework against conditions where the model did not work.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the most operationally useful material is the argument that product strategy should emerge from people closest to the technical and user reality, not be handed down through planning hierarchies — a direct challenge to roadmap-driven organizations where direction flows top-down. The emphasis on hiring calibration as a CPO-level responsibility, rather than a delegated HR function, is a concrete structural implication: Schmidt and Rosenberg describe senior people spending disproportionate time in hiring committees precisely because team composition determines product outcomes more than any planning process. Read against the grain, the book also raises a useful question about what happens to product direction when the 'smart creative' model is adopted without the psychological safety and information transparency that made it functional at Google.