How does Google Labs fit into the innovation cycle for email and search?
Pittman: The relationship between engineering and end users is important to the innovation cycle. The more we can close the gap between original ideas that pop into an engineer’s mind and then hand it off to the end user for evaluation, the faster we can innovate. Having the feedback is essential. Although Labs has been around for years, we didn’t rely on it as a mechanism to establish a dialog between engineers and end users. We want to make it easy for engineers to launch early and often, as well as give end users the ability to find features and functions of interest even if they aren’t perfect and polished. It’s a great feedback loop for what isn’t working, what is working and what needs work. How do engineers submit 20%-time projects to Google Labs? Pittman: The 20%-time projects let engineers listen to user feedback. There are dozens of Gmail experiments running simultaneously, for example. Each is equally important to the evolution of the product. Google Labs is organized so it
