Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo

This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid $250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make great products.<p>I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this <i>quickly.</i> If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.

By an amusing coincidence the announcement of Mayer's new job came the day after I finished reading <i>I'm Feeling Lucky</i>[1], the memoirs of "Google employee #59". Its author makes it easy to read between the lines and get the impression that Marissa Mayer was an aggressively disruptive incompetent who could do whatever she pleased because she was sleeping with Larry Page. Whether that's actually fair I have no idea, but the book is interesting. The timing was such that the phrase "short sell!" popped into my head as soon as I saw the news.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394</a>

One additional thing I'd like to see: Really strongly encourage dogfooding. One of the most depressing things I experienced while working at Yahoo was when I'd look around and see all my co-workers using competing email, search, maps, etc products. People looked at me funny when they noticed that I had taken some time to configure my.yahoo.com and set it as my home page. There was no sense of ownership of the various products, so nobody really cared whether or not they worked well.<p>On a related note, on the rare occasion when somebody did try using yahoo properties and they found an issue or wanted to suggest a feature (e.g. more powerful mail filtering capabilities), the common refrain that typically came back was "You're not the target audience." It was as if yahoo only wanted to cater to the most basic use case. Yahoo needs hiding behind this "not the target audience" crap and challenge itself to make a product that is both powerful enough to appeal to sophisticated users and simple enough to appeal to users with more basic needs. It can be done, and I'd point to Google and Apple as examples of companies that are enjoying much success right now because they've seen the value of it.

Build the Yahoo phone.<p>Mayer has the product experience to do it.<p>What do people do most with their phones? Email, messaging, photos, news, small games. Yahoo is strong in every one of these and more established across the board than all its competitors.<p>She can leverage Android/Ubuntu because she knows plenty of Unix developers, Amazon is paving the way for non-Google Android products, and the new Ubuntu mobile OS is pretty amazing.<p>She can leverage Flickr. This is Yahoo's golden answer to Facebook's Instagram, a $1b equal. Imagine a Yahoo phone with built-in Flickr upload and sharing.<p>She can leverage Yahoo media content alliances to provide a great content-driven phone, with news, music, and movies. I daresay Yahoo can pull ahead of even Apple and Amazon on these fronts.<p>She can leverage social networking: Yahoo Instant Messenger is a leader, Games is a leader, and Social Bar had 90m users and was a significant leader of Facebook’s Open Graph.<p>She can leverage Yahoo mail. Yahoo is still a huge player in email, ahead of Gmail in terms of users and IMHO interface as well.<p>Manufacturing and distribution can be outsourced. HTC is great for this. Start with a small phone, 3G, for mom and pop, and a $99 price point. Compete with the iPhone on price, and with Google phones on content. Subsidize like Amazon Prime.<p>Most important, Yahoo needs a rallying point-- a bold vision , something amazing to attract top developers and bring together diverse properties. The best way to do this is to go big.<p>If you're a mobile developer, who do you look to for leadership right now? Google/Android is splintered, Microsoft/Nokia seems DOA, Apple/iOS is walled, Facebook is admittedly behind, and Amazon is just gearing up.<p>Mobile is where all the action is happening, and it's where all these big competitors are going as fast as they can-- yet none has the mobile space well entrenched yet. This is Yahoo's perfect opportunity to bring it all together, to hire and inspire developers, and build a world-class integrated product. I believe the board knows this.<p>Yahoo has all the pieces to make this a home run. What they've been missing is the product leader. My money's on Mayer to do this.

Sounds like a step-by-step legacy code refactoring from an engineer :).<p>I'm sure in the real-world, executing any of the advises will have unknown repercussion.<p>1. It's hard to fire 10k people _correctly_ and expect things to still work without crushing morale (you may fired potential heroes as well), or perhaps even being poked by government over job losses?<p>2. I'm not sure a 23 years old hot-shot developer exist. No way Jose. There may be some smart and talented 23 year old, but they're by no mean "hot shot developer". You may get a better result by hiring a 26-32 years old developers. But not fresh grad. Unless your point being to work them like there is no tomorrow, a typical scenario in Silicon Valley startups. Or: today's mess will become tomorrow problem, so you're back to square one with Yahoo! sooner or later =&#62; uncontrolled legacy codebases. [Nobody will come out and say that Yahoo has one of the best codebase out there, even Flickr is notoriously bad].<p>3. Rounding up the smartest people in the planet is hard to begin with, making sure they all can work together without brushing ego is even harder (especially when everyone wants to leave their mark), finally, expecting rainbows and unicorns to show up is magical I would say.<p>5. Yeah, whatever, BYOD, use standard toolset, sure. If sys-admin needs their BB, be it.<p>The rest are generics and nothing to complain/argue/discuss.<p>Yahoo! should definitely shed its fat: people and products, no doubt. Next they should think hard on what needs to be done with the successful products they have left. Once stabilization and culture are in place, then you can start doing something more extreme. Rocking the almost tumbling boat seems to be a recipe to drown everybody.

I know so much of this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion.<p>It's one of those, "yeah I meant that" if it turns out right, and, "no, I'm clearly enacting poe's law", when it's wrong scenarios. "I'm clearly joking <i>wink</i>".<p>Anyway, you could have reduced all of those ten points in to a single bullet point and I still would have upvoted this story.<p>&#62; Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means. Come up with a goal that people can actually visualize.<p>This is sooo true. Marissa needs to grab this opportunity and ride the Yahoo-bull-horn for all it's worth. Ignore investors... Reinvent the entire company that you have stepped up to take charge of.<p>Don't do what BB's spineless CEO did, and start throwing out quotes like "not much has to change". <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberry-RIM/52748290/1" rel="nofollow">http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-22/Blackberr...</a><p>Marissa needs to change <i>everyones</i> perspective of what Yahoo was, and what it can be.<p>Yahoo are still on my shitlist from the whole FB debacle. Mayer has already shown that Yahoo can still be "cool", so reinvent everything that once was the old Yahoo.<p>&#60;/end major rant&#62;

Seems like solid advice. I have an honest question, even if it's a quote from Office Space: What is it that Yahoo actually does? I honestly don't know.<p>I know they have a random collection of services (news, photos, mail), but if they were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone really care?

I know you're not joking on this, but <i>seriously?</i><p>"No more BlackBerries as the official devices at Yahoo."<p>How is this even possible in 2012?

A lot of you keep asking what it is that Yahoo! does, which is a valid question, but you're forgetting about what they own and what they <i>could</i> do with their properties.<p>If there's one word that ties all of their more popular services together, it's "social". Tons of people still use Yahoo! Games, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Del.icio.us – all incredibly social communities. And Yahoo! Mail is still widely used.<p>I think their issue is that they lack an underlying framework from which these services should be stemming. With proper structure and integration, they could really give Google and Facebook a run for their money. Google has been trying for ages to utilize their Gmail userbase to bolster their social plays, and it's worked with varying success. Yahoo! has both the email userbase <i>and</i> the social communities; they just need to find a way to tie the two together into a cohesive social platform.

Start by fixing Yahoo! Mail. It's become SPAM central, and there's no reason for that. Also, stop charging for POP mail access - is it really worth it? I've been a Yahoo mail user since the 1990's, but if anyone asks me for my email address now, it's gmail. Only because I know my mail that goes there will arrive relatively quickly, and I haven't had my account hacked by spammers ever with gmail. Don't try to make Yahoo mail look like an online version of Outlook, it gets so cramped. An inspiration to start with would be something along the lines of how mail is viewed on the iPad, but available in the same way on the desktop (yes, many people out there, especially long standing yahoo mail users, still use PC's).

Single best quote “We ship code, not slide decks”

"No more pet projects to reinvent what everyone else in the open source world has already built. Fire anyone who uses the words ‘Yahoo scale’ to debate this with you."<p>I seriously doubt this is going to come naturally to an ex-Googler.

Reading this sort of reminds of that moment detailed in the Jobs biography.<p>Upon Jobs return to Apple, he asks the product managers to present their current product offerings. They're detailing all sorts of minutiae, differing versions to address different sub-markets, yada yada yada. Jobs waves them all off, draws a grid and says they need four products.<p>It certainly seems that Yahoo could use a moment like that.

My advice? Take the layers of middle managers who have been there for years, give them their gumball machines or espresso makers, offer to buy out a percentage of their long-underwater options, and make them promise to go work somewhere else.<p>The inertia is so ingrown there the only way is to cut out the "lifers" who were given their incentives in equity and clog up the system with incompetence or resentment.

Another idea would to stop paying sub-par writers to write the articles that appear on the front page. I can't take a company seriously that employs writers who only get read to see what other facts they get wrong or how badly an article is written (I'm looking at you Chris Chase).<p>Fixing the quality of the articles would surely have me coming back for more. I remember reading a fitness article about "5 myths of fitness" or some stupid title like that. One of them was that "muscle weighs more than fat". They said it was a myth because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat...I was just mortified that it was allowed to be published on a site like Yahoo. By that logic bricks and feathers weigh the same because a pound of bricks is the same as a pound of feathers...

I really like and admire #2 <i>Spend $$ in finding great talent all the way down to the front-line product managers and engineers. This will often mean paying some hot-shot 23-year old coder 5x more than what she would make at Google or Facebook and beating ridiculous counter offers. Do it. That one great engineer will be worth more than the five engineers you have on the payroll today.</i><p>However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say <i>she is 5x better</i>. In all seriousness, I'd like to ask how to make such a determination. I think this advise looks good on paper, but really really hard to implement.

I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets.<p>Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them.<p>If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology.<p>(I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)

This is such an interesting inside look at Yahoo, which kind of makes it obvious why they've been faltering. But it also means that there are frustrated people there who want to make great products and services, if they can cut through the bureaucracy and the arbitrary rules. (I don't have recent inside information, so I'm extrapolating here.)<p>There's so much potential here. I'm still very excited to see what Yahoo will become.

Are there really 23 year-olds making $600,000 per year (=5x what I'm told Google pays) at large tech companies writing javascript? Or is that just hyperbole?

"Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign. No one knows what that phrase means."<p>No one knows what that phrase means because no one knows what the hell Yahoo! does anymore. Honestly, why does this company exist? What purpose do they serve? What is their focus? Hire the brightest engineers to build what?? Yahoo! should have died a long time ago. It's just riding a dwindling wave of its past glory.

Yahoo has fantastic loyal customers. It also has niche consumer businesses - finance, weather, groups, mail. These are very big niches. However, precisely because Yahoo is a conglomerate of diverse businesses, it has been difficult to describe Yahoo. Yahoo is a portfolio company.<p>However, Yahoo isn't a credible platform company. Microsoft is. Google is. Apple is.<p>While Yahoo open sources a lot of its internal components, heck, it was one of the earliest adopters of OpenID - my StackOverflow account still uses my Yahoo login - this is not the same as building a platform. Android is a platform. Google apps is a platform. AWS is a platform. Even AdSesnse is a platform. Twitter is a platform.<p>Here's my outline:<p>1. Yahoo needs to protect their base. Customers might move away from Yahoo mail when eventually people get their own domain names, or when they want to edit documents online on Google Docs. Yahoo should court the small businesses who already use Yahoo to spend more money with them.<p>2. Yahoo needs to aggressive court developers to leverage Yahoo signins, Yahoo mail to provide new services. If Yahoo would handle the payments, it would be even better. A 30% cut would make Yahoo a great affiliate for many devs trying to get traction.<p>3. On the Ad front, there is much Yahoo can do to copy Google in terms of display ad networks - once Yahoo has successfully courted smaller businesses.

&#62; 8. Make a table with the columns ‘Invest’, ‘Maintenance Mode’, ‘Kill’ and fill it up with Yahoo’s product portfolio. Share it with the employees and the press so everyone finds out from you rather than AllThingsD as to what your priorities are. Favor the kill column whenever in doubt.<p>Or maybe let the employees vote on it. Collectively, they probably have a much better idea than Marissa Mayer (or any one person) which products are dogs and which are going somewhere.

11. Ignore all unsolicited advice that doesn't include the words "customer" or "user".

The best one:<p>Make a huge sign with the phrase ‘the premier digital media company’. Then make a video of you running a bulldozer over it crushing that sign.<p>Yes, Yahoo, you're not a media company, you're a technology company. You don't want to be a media company. Media companies make shitty profits (see AOL, Time Warner, NBC), technology companies make amazing profits (see Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple).

12. Hire sriramk as VP Engineering.

First things first. Figure out "what is Yahoo!" immediately.<p>Remember Carol Bartz? <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/ok-seriously-what-is-yahoo/</a>

I suspect people will disagree but my top two would be: 1. Yahoo is not Google and that's o.k 2. Take the time to understand Yahoo before doing anything drastic.

PS - Bring back Yahoo's SoMa billboard! Let people know that someone has turned the lights back on at Yahoo. (literally and figuratively) :D

They have so much value in the products, yet they aren't even being developed.<p>I can see Yahoo Answers being a far bigger brand, News could be important as well as Flickr if as you said they actually develop it. Any products that aren't being improved after a certain amount of time should be killed.

Love this part - Marc Andreessen thinks you need to fire over 10K people. He’s probably right. I would start with anyone with the title ‘Architect’ or ‘Program Manager’ in their title. HR is probably another good place to look too

To all those asking "What is Yahoo?" ad nauseum, can you answer the corresponding question, "What is Google?" ? And once you've done that, tell us how G+, Picasa, GAE, GDrive, GMaps, Android, etc. fit into this definition?<p>Thanks!

And for god's sake kill Connected Life. The fact that product teams aren't allowed to own the mobile app that goes with their products was just Marco's bullshit empire building, not a good organizational idea.

Maybe they can just fix Yahoo! Mail? Less spam. Better API. If is not like Gmail become better over last 5 years.

It will be interesting to see if Mayer leads Yahoo in the direction of a "Mini-Google" or an "Anti-Google".

What advice? The new CEO will deliver in any case, Yahoo!

... and how long exactly did you work at Yahoo?