Defending the VP of Common Sense

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Chris Thompson, my colleague and author of the Feeling Lucky blog on this site, doesn't think much of my suggestion that Google hire a VP of common sense, or that having such a person on staff might've helped the company avoid the Buzz debacle altogether. Hey, reasonable people can differ on what I admit is a thought experiment of sorts. My article was foremost a commentary on how Google's (GOOG) internal flaws became exposed when it launched a product without doing any sort of external testing. So let's start there: Does the VP of common sense allow that—a product rollout with zero external testing—to happen? I say no. And if Google tells him, "Sorry, we can't beta-test Buzz because it shares so much private information that exposing it to one user would expose it to all of them," I would hope his reaction would be, "Well, that's really stupid." 

Thompson also compares my VP to a newspaper ombudsman who "gets paid to sound smug after the company screws up again." That's just incorrect; the entire point of the role is to be the last stop before a public rollout happens, not to tap dance on the corpse. The VP isn't blogging about all the cool new apps he gets to test drive at Google HQ. In fact, maybe his identity isn't public at all. Or maybe "he" is actually a 100 person sample group—a collective VP, if you will. Focus groups aren't exactly new, after all.

I should clarify one thing Thompson assumed I want the VP to be tasked with that, in fact, I don't. Google doesn't need to run its founding articles (objective and text-based search with a killer algorithm) by the VP of common sense, nor does any company need to. The VP is the physical embodiment of the common sense that starts to trickle out the door as a company goes from two to 20 to 20,000 employees in less time than than it takes for a newborn to reach puberty. He only enters the picture after that critical mass is reached.

Nor does Google need to run acquisitions like YouTube past the VP. Those business and legal issues are for someone else to chew on. However, if Google had said, "Guess what, since we bought YouTube, we're just going to create automatic YouTube accounts for everyone who uses Gmail AND link you up to YouTube friends based on your Gmail contacts." Well, that would be something for the VP to shout about. The narrow mandate of the VP of common sense, to be clear, is to look at new products or huge changes to old products, and stand in for us, Joe User, when the lawyers and engineers and product managers are too busy coding and drafting circles around each other, to pay attention to the product. Especially at a company where the co-founders have pretty much checked themselves out of making small-bore, product-level decisions out of sheer necessity.

In seeming counterpoint to me, Thompson links to a CNET writer who notes that Google needed to do more external testing (or set up an internal department staffed with experts who can simulate external user test-cases) for Buzz, and that Google has no chief privacy officer. It seems to me, then, that the main complaint here is that I embodied my external testing department into a single person with a catchy title. And to me, that complaint just doesn't make much sense.