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Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?

The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?

And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)




"Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"

Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.

You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.


> and a list of videos

Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha


Of course no, the search is handled by a different team, but does that team also work on the frontend ? I would expect them to have a quite different set of skills from those that do frontend work, at least at Google's size.

And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result


Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.


Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being acceptable :)


Being deliberately obtuse, or ignoring the context?


Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.


To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.


The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.




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