Gmail Team Offers Lessons on Innovation, Project Management

Firas Raouf

March 19, 2010

Adam Marcus sent around this article today… Six guiding principles for project teams:

  • Strive for a goal, even if you don’t know how to achieve it.
  • Create a culture of execution.
  • Protect your employees so they can do the work they’re supposed to do.
  • Empower your employees to take action on their ideas.
  • Don’t damage the existing experience in an effort to add features.
  • Over-communicate with your users so you know how they’ll react to changes.

We have found that management teams that institute agile development methods as a best practice process across the entire organization (not just R&D) excel at creating competitive advantage.

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.