Seeking Feedback for Innovation - Gmail Labs

With the launch of Gmail Labs, Google is further strengthening their position as web leader as they demonstrate the importance of feedback.

“Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not,” Google explains.

As any successful company knows, a lot of innovations fail before the perfect product or service can be created. Google is extremely successful, but like most businesses of such a grandiose scale, not everything they’ve tried has been well received.

With the launch of Gmail Labs, however, they hope to make the process of innovation interactive. Anyone can experiment with Google’s most recent tweaks, programs and experiments. Based on the amount of use and quality of feedback each trial section gets, Google will determine which are worth investing further in.

Employees at Google can “have a big, positive influence and at the same time experiment rapidly, getting ideas to users very quickly,” Google explains in their blog. “That combo of size and speed is something we care about a lot, and we’ve designed a culture and company that makes it possible.”

“The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature. To tens of millions of users. No design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing. Some of the Labs features will occasionally break. (There’s an escape hatch.)

“The result of this loosely-directed chaos is 13 Labs features, with more on the way.”