Matrix planning and allocation

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Big Rock teams (aka “hoodie squads”)

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: This was our tracking for big bets (generated from the

Big Rock $100 prioritization

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exercise). Often these Big Rocks would align closely to an Investment Area team, but sometimes they crossed across multiple teams. Our process was gradually designed for the latter since it was the more complex case. We often called these “hoodie squads” to indicate that these team members should think of their primary team as the Big Rock team instead of their home IA, and it was signified by answering “which hoodie would this person wear if they were asked to wear their team’s hoodie to work.”

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Investment Areas teams

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: The YouTube team was organized into

15

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investment area teams (grouped into

4

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focus areas). As our primary organization structure and primary unit of planning and allocation, every employee belonged to an Investment Area. These teams presented their requests for headcount in their

Two-pagers

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(with low, medium, high guidance) and also managed the allocation of their team members between “IA Bets” and “Big Rocks.”

Table 1 | Big Rocks

Table 2 | Investment Areas

Table 3 | People Roster

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