Google's Strategy is There is No "Strategy"

And that was not on purpose, which is an example of the strategy.

Google’s Strategy is a “slime mold”. Stealing that metaphor from

Alex Komoroske

.

And it’s such a different “strategy” type that it’s not what most people think of as strategy. Most people, particularly business people, think of strategy as a sequence of moves. It’s a chess game. You have a five-year plan, articulated in a deck, that looks like a Civilization Tech Tree. The Strategy says "First we will do A, then we will capture market B, which unlocks our ability to achieve C." This is taught in business schools. It’s what well-run, serious companies do.

Google does not do this. As someone who likes to do this, this can be quite frustrating!

This is not a moral failing or an oversight. It is a deeply embedded, core feature of the company. To an outsider, it looks like chaos, a lack of discipline, or a fusillade of products shot at a wall to see what sticks. To an insider, it’s just… Tuesday.

Google's strategy isn't a plan. A plan is binding. A plan says "no" to a thousand interesting and potentially lucrative paths because they aren't the path. A plan, in a world changing at the speed of technology, is a relic.

Google’s strategy is a meta-strategy. It is not a roadmap; it is a recipe for creating map-makers. The strategy is to cultivate a specific culture of elite hill-climbing and then unleash it on a massive, resource-rich landscape.

It does not always work! Google itself is somewhat blind to this, and often launches things that fail spectacularly, and loads of kayfabe and disingenuous internal politics happens. Empirically, that’s just a load-bearing cost of having this “not a strategy” strategy. It’s almost on purpose.

---

The Strategy is the Culture

Think of Google as a giant, intelligent slime mold. Its prime directive is to explore and find nutrients (the next billion-user product, the next technological paradigm shift). A central brain cannot direct each tendril of the mold where to go. The search space is too vast.

So, how does it find the food?

1. Hire for Hill-Climbing: Google hires a very specific type of person. Not just smart, but someone who is constitutionally incapable of seeing a steep technical gradient and not wanting to climb it. The internal status, promotion, and reward systems are all optimized for this. You are not rewarded for diligently executing Year 3 of a 5-year plan. You are rewarded for building a system that is 10x faster, scales to 100x the users, or solves a problem previously thought impossible.

2. Provide Infinite Levers: The company builds the most astonishingly powerful internal infrastructure on the planet. Tools, platforms, and data that exist nowhere else. This is the agar in the petri dish. It gives every tendril of the slime mold the leverage to pursue its local objective with maximum velocity.

3. Let the Hills Do the Talking: There is no grand pronouncement that "we shall now focus on video." Instead, a few engineers start tinkering. They build something cool. It gets traction internally. More people join. The hill they are climbing proves to be higher and more interesting than adjacent hills. Resources flow to momentum. The strategy is an emergent property of thousands of local decisions made by engineers deciding which technical problem is most compelling today.

A concrete strategic plan from on high would be anathema to this. It would be corporate malpractice. It would tell the thousands of brilliant, ambitious cells of the slime mold to stop exploring, to ignore the promising scent of nutrients to their left, because the G-Doc from Q3 says the path is straight ahead.

It doesn’t stop people from trying, but the culture will eat your strategy for breakfast.

---

The Plan is a Ghost

This is why, internally, product requirement documents (PRDs) and charters often feel like performative theater. They are not blueprints for execution in the way an architect’s drawings are. They are, more often than not, an attempt to retroactively drape a narrative over a movement that is already happening. Or, they are a totem used to secure headcount, a justification for the resources needed to go climb a hill someone has already found.

The real steering doesn't happen in the strategy meeting; it happens in the technical implementation meetings. The direction is set not by the PM with the most beautiful vision deck, but by the engineer who discovers a way to fix a data-loading bottleneck that increases TPU utilization by 19%.

This is not some clever hack that solves all strategic problems. It does have drawbacks: It’s harder to pivot, it’s harder to make clear strategic decisions.

Google is betting on a simple, almost biological, principle: if you create a large enough meta-organism composed of hyper-capable, locally-optimized cells, it will collectively and inevitably find the path of maximum opportunity. Some cells will hit dead ends. Some will wither. But the organism as a whole will expand, thrive, and conquer new territory.

There is no plan. The plan is to be the kind of organism that doesn't need one.

So What Do you Do?

This doesn't mean needs that a strategy fulfills goes away; it means the work of a strategist is radically different and, frankly, much harder. It's not about crafting a single, perfect plan. It is the work of generating multiple, parallel tech trees simultaneously. Your job isn't to write one PRD; it’s to hold five potential PRDs in your head at once. In one future, you're a generalized platform. In another, you're a high-touch professional service for one critical customer. In a third, you're a simple, composable API for the long tail. You sketch these potential routes, knowing most will be abandoned. The goal is not to predict the future, but to create a portfolio of possible futures.

You do not share these multiple futures with most people. It’s overwhelming. That would be like a technical architect sharing the nine different ways they could have designed the incredibly hard system that just shipped. They only explained to you the one that worked.

Then, you go out to the front lines with the hill-climbers. You watch where the slime mold is actually moving. When a team of engineers makes an unexpected breakthrough, or when a nascent use case suddenly gets real traction, you don't treat it as a distraction from "the plan." You recognize it as a signal from reality. At that moment, your job is to collapse the wave function. You take the five potential strategies you were juggling and discard the four that no longer fit the facts on the ground. You then swap in the one that just became real and amplify it with all available resources. This requires constant vigilance, deep technical empathy, and the humility to admit that the most brilliant strategy document is worthless compared to one working demo that people actually want to use.

It's less like being a general with a map and more like being a quantum physicist, observing the experiment and shaping the outcome by the very act of measuring it. Mapping out the Legible Frontier