Chris-posterous

Mayer holds an average of 70 meetings a week and serves as the last stop before engineers and project managers get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Eight teams consisting of directors, managers, and engineers—all at various stages of product development—answer to Mayer.

In a shop like Google (GOOG), much of the work takes place in meetings, and her goal is to make sure teams have a firm mandate, strategic direction, and actionable information, while making participants feel motivated and respected.

Excellent article in BusinessWeek on Google's meeting process. While a lot of these techniques really work best with large groups, many of the ideas can be "scaled" down to the small business (especially agile ones). I have seen several articles that have talked about the way Google uses a "numbers" approach to make market and product decisions rather than an emotional approach. In fact there was recently a popular article from a Google creative director who left based on this very issue.

While sometimes this has created some sterile products, overall it works well for Google and some of that approach can be applied to most software businesses successfully.