The LPA cycle at Google: Launch, Promo, Abandon

From the comment on “Stadia died because nobody trusts Google”


To understand that you have to understand how google works.The career progression and promotion at google is based on “move the needle” a.k.a. launches.

You launch a service, or a major overhaul, and you put it in your promo package. No one ever fucking get promoted for “maintaing” or “fixing something broken”. No, it is all about launching, and then putting the launch in your promo package.

When something like Stadia, or any other service, launches. You will always see an immediate slowdown in development and features. It is because all experienced and ambitious engineers LEAVE the project very shortly after the launch. Because there is no promo-food to get anymore. So they leave for a new project/team where they can get more credits towards promo. The people that remain are those that can not easily transfer teams, i.e. inexperienced or sometimes just poor engineers.

You see this all the time with google products. Rapid development and activity until the launch, and then everything grinds to a halt. I told you above why that is a thing.

When I worked at Google in 2012, internally we called it the LPA cycle. Launch, Promo, Abandon. Yes, that is how we described it internally at Google at the time.

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