Mission as strategy – connecting the dots at Yahoo!

Posted May 15th, 2007 at 10:15 pm by Jeff Weiner, Network Division

 14 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes

Last year, the executive team at Yahoo! made the decision to re-organize the company with one of the central themes being the evolution of a culture from one largely organized around products, to one that is far more organized around our customers. The goal behind the re-org was to help us rationalize and consolidate duplicative products, create greater focus on key priorities, clarify strategic direction, and ultimately develop an environment where we could accelerate the speed and quality of our decision-making. We also wanted to do a better job creating value for our customers, from delighting our consumers with great product experiences to delighting advertisers and publishers by maximizing their ROI when using our products and services.

As part of the realignment, we formed the Yahoo! Network Division, which includes the majority of Yahoo!’s consumer-facing products — our Communications products such as Mail and Messenger; our Community and Social Media properties including Groups, Flickr and Bix; our Search products including Web Search and Answers; the Media properties comprising our News & Information and Entertainment business units; and our Front Doors including the Yahoo.com home page and My Yahoo!.

So, what’s the rationale behind putting all of these assets under one roof? The answer to that question lies no further than our mission statement: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”

In this statement, we not only define our sense of purpose as a company, but also a strategic framework for the Network Division as well. Let me explain further by breaking the mission statement down into its component pieces (and bear with me…this is a bit longer than our average blog post, but it’s an important area of discussion and one we thought was worth the additional detail):

“To connect people…”

If I had to focus on one word that best sums up what we are trying to accomplish in our mission, it’s “connect.” When we talk about connecting people we are specifically talking about connecting our consumers to their most essential needs, connecting our advertisers and publishers to their most valuable consumers, and connecting the dots internally to create far greater efficiencies and fully leverage the company’s strengths. Speaking of connecting dots internally, our recent product announcements regarding closing Yahoo! Photos and Yahoo! Auctions in the U.S. and Canada represent a clear indication that we have begun to do so in earnest. And it’s not just about rationalizing existing product lines — it’s also about better leveraging and integrating the powerful assets we’ve got (e.g. Flickr integration into Yahoo! Search).

“…to their passions…”

While “passions” may initially strike you as one of those feel good, corporate-speak words, it’s important to understand that there is a lot of science that goes into truly making connecting people to their passions a reality. If we are going to be successful at this endeavor, it means we’ll not only need to understand the intentions of our users, but also leverage the fundamental technologies to make this possible. Fortunately, we have spent the last few years building what is arguably the most relevant search engine on the Web (seriously…and before you say it, when was the last time you compared?) :) and have most recently leveraged our core competency in matching technologies into our new and vastly improved search engine marketing system, a.k.a. “Panama.”

The key going forward will be to continue to expand these technologies to virtually every pixel we can improve on the Yahoo! Network. In other words, we want to connect the right user to the right content at the right time. If we get this right, the implications are considerable. Consider that the one-size-fits-all content featured on most web sites clicks at only a fraction of the top algorithmic results in web search. Why? Because we know exactly what you are looking for when you do a query. However, for the most part we can only do our best to anticipate what you want when you are browsing your favorite property. The goal is to close that gap, and ultimately make your content browsing experience as fundamentally relevant as your web search experience. This is a lofty ambition, and probably more vision than mission, but it’s a worthy one, and one of the highest priorities for the Network team today.

“…their communities…”

In a day and age where discussion on the Web inevitably turns to the rising influence of community and social media, connecting people to their communities may on the surface appear to be the most straightforward component of our mission statement. For the most part, we all intuitively understand the power of community and how the communities we participate in, online and offline, create value in our day-to-day lives.

While communities have and will always continue to play a central role in creating value on the Yahoo! Network (e.g. Groups, Flickr, Answers, Bix — and stay tuned for the next gen of products in this area), when we talk about connecting people to their communities, strategically we are talking about creating better user experiences not simply by knowing what you want, but also by leveraging who you know. This dynamic has traditionally manifested itself when you use products like the Yahoo! Mail address book or Yahoo! Messenger contact list. However, with our rapidly expanding number of properties facilitating connections between people in various contextual environments, an entirely new world of possibilities is introduced. In addition to developing some exciting new community products to help make this happen, we’re also building out our research ranks to include some of the most renowned social scientists in the world to help us further develop these capabilities.

“…and the world’s knowledge.”

When people first hear the word “knowledge” in the context of Yahoo!, they may immediately think Yahoo! Search or Yahoo! Answers. However, consider that virtually everything we do on the Network results in finding, using, sharing or expanding information or knowledge in some way or another. Communication applications like Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger facilitate the ability for people to connect and exchange knowledge. As described above, our community assets do the same. Our news & information properties such as News, Finance, and Sports are all about the exchange of information and knowledge, and our entertainment assets like Movies, TV, Music, and Games also facilitate the exchange of knowledge around those activities (i.e. the best shows to watch or music to listen to).

Our goal is to tie these underlying stores of knowledge together wherever and whenever it might be useful for you. In other words, we want to leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web. One of the things we’re most excited about is the concept of “open,” and all of the potential we have yet to tap by opening up some of the most trafficked pages on Yahoo.com to the highest quality publishers on the Web, regardless of their size. (Though bear in mind, the more scalable your infrastructure, the better. Our front page reaches over 40 million unique users per day — that’s a whole lot of attention to be channeling to your servers. Stay tuned for more on this soon…)

So there it is: our corporate mission as a strategic framework for the Network Division. It’s a mission and strategy that not only governs our big picture in terms of where we want to go, but also our day-to-day in terms of how we’re going to get there. As I’m sure you’d agree, at the end of the day, any strategy, no matter how good it sounds in theory, is only as valuable as its ability to be executed. With the re-org now behind us, and a clear sense of where we want to go in place, our attention is now very much focused on connecting the dots, creating value for our customers, and making this strategy a reality.

Jeff Weiner
EVP Yahoo! Network Division

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14 Comments Add your own

Debbie Payne | May 16th, 2007 at 1:01 am

I have a comment WHAT happen to the yahoo yodel thats what made your site worth being on I love that yodel and I wish you would put it back on your site PLEASE.

Libran Lover | May 16th, 2007 at 8:59 am

You want to be organized around the customers and help them get to what they need fast? Then let us get to our inboxes and see our mails, AS SOON AS we log into Yahoo Mail. Whoever made the decision to show us a useless intermediate page full of news and ads, with an ‘Inbox’ link, was not focussing on the customers!

TheAnand | May 16th, 2007 at 9:27 am

thats a nice idea and definitly a good thing to do, to concentrate on assets….But I see a lot of services that do not fit into anywhere…mybloglog….how do you propose to bring it in connection with the existing products?

Ted Rheingold | May 16th, 2007 at 12:26 pm

At Dogster and Catster, we’ve always found that connecting people with common passions online has been extremely rewarding and successful. While Google and Microsoft battle to own the corporate software market and while incredibly powerful search inexorably becomes a commodity, Yahoo! will become a giant passion center that neither can ever hope to touch.

Bow wow, meow!

Andrew | May 16th, 2007 at 6:36 pm

Jeff, I certainly do agree that “any strategy, no matter how good it sounds in theory, is only as valuable as its ability to be executed. ” With that in mind, the the Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir incident is cause for great concern, indicating as it does that a lot of dot-connecting lies ahead.
I posted about the contrast between the mission and that particular action at:
http://changingway.org/2007/05/16/yahoo-people-flickr/

Eric Jackson | May 17th, 2007 at 6:12 am

Jeff:

I think you would agree that this 1300 word post isn’t the definitive final word on how Yahoo will win in implementing its strategy/mission. However, this articulation has been absent these last 5.5 months since the reorg. Indeed, the voice for Audience has been silent. Thank you for taking this first step with this post (and with some of these first moves mentioned). Until an Audience head is named, it will continue to be critical for you to fill this void.

Best of luck.

Scott | May 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am

Quote: “Weiner- connecting our consumers to their most essential needs, connecting our advertisers and publishers to their most valuable consumers, and connecting the dots internally to create far greater efficiencies and fully leverage the company’s strengths. Speaking of connecting dots internally, our recent product announcements regarding closing Yahoo! Photos and Yahoo! Auctions in the U.S. and Canada represent a clear indication that we have begun to do so in earnest. And it’s not just about rationalizing existing product lines — it’s also about better leveraging and integrating the powerful assets we’ve got (e.g. Flickr integration into Yahoo! Search).”

“My Reply,
How in the world does removing Yahoo Auction! efficiency make for better connections? That statement itself does not make any sense!

If people want to too connect they go to MySpace! Yahoo Inc is going in the wrong direction! They need to shake up the upper guru’s there and come up with new idea’s not something that has already been done!”

Alyce | May 18th, 2007 at 8:48 am

Yahoo apparently is pursuing a course of releasing features in lieu of products and retiring real products that actually work. It is extemely depressing to watch the chaos. Beyond that, as a concerned albeit very very small shareholder, would the company please consider re-implementing a single press release site (not a “chatty” blog) that has all news from Yahoo, written coherently, in standard English.

Nicki Dugan | May 18th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

@Alyce – Bingo! Thanks for noting that our blog is not a press release site. Yodel Anecdotal has a very different mission — it has no ambitions to cover “all news from Yahoo!”. For that, we’ve always maintained our separate pressroom, which you can find at http://pressroom.yahoo.com. That’s where you can always find the straight scoop, but come back here to get additional insights, perspectives and behind-the-scenes commentary.

Joe S | May 29th, 2007 at 7:29 am

I believed in Yahoo enough to become a shareholder, but how can you say part of the mission is “to connect people” when a fundamental feature like memebr search is down so much of the time.

Not only does it frequently go down, it takes days, often weeks to restore it. There has got to be a better way to respond.

Robert Lambert | June 1st, 2007 at 2:09 pm

Ok here is a brain storm for you….for years I’ve been switching from yahoo as my home page and portal to use google to search….I finally realized why….I know you may have spent mega $$ on the home page design but there is one thing that you can do that would keep me and I imagine many people from doing that…..

You need to move the search window down to the mid point on the page ……I find so awkward to use that I will jump to google to avoid using it…its not the functionality of your search but the location of the bar…..anyway thats my take on why Google is wiping up on search…..I believe that your results are similiar….but something that obvious is missed by many….

Floyd | June 16th, 2007 at 9:05 am

And then you put ads in the AT&T yahoo mail experience, and fragged up the beta to no end.
Yahoo has consistantly missed the mark with all their changes for many users this past year. Overwhelmingly, people are saying ‘you ‘fixed’ what wasn’t broken, and now it sucks’. You really need to do a better job on trying to understand user’s needs before inflicting new products on them. I left as a AT&T Yahoo customer (phone and net both). Very sad to see Yahoo take such a nose-dive across the board. I hope someone can stop the madness soon. Before it’s too late.

nathan | June 19th, 2007 at 8:59 pm

Look at “Unlimited Storage It’s Coming Soon” posted on May 14 by Yahoo vice president of marketing. There are about 186 posts as I write this, and at least 150 of those are by people who are “furious” (and other adjectives that mean very angry) about the very large advertisements that appear on the YM Beta e-mail inbox. How does this fit into the mission?

B. C. Schmerker | June 13th, 2009 at 12:11 am

I found this Entry a nice cursory view of the often tricky process of streamlining available services. A lot of features from both Y! Members and Y! 360 Beta eventually got a redesign for Y! Profiles, where they now reside. Likewise, flickr took features from both Y! Photos and to a lesser extent Bix (sadly, not all of Bix’ capabilities have a new home as of this Comment). Pleasingly, I had little trouble formatting the profile data from Y! Answers, Y! 360 Beta and Bix for my page at Y! Profiles; not all the formats in the above were identical, so some amendment was expected. Pretty good so far, but plenty of room for improvement, too.