Before she was CEO of Yahoo, and before she was a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer was a software engineer. "Yahoo is the most amazing design problem I've ever gotten to work on," Mayer said on stage at Bloomberg's Technology Conference. When you first start to work on a company, Mayer says, it's a design problem — which was the case at Yahoo. When you start growing your products and trying to scale up and up, as Yahoo has been doing, that design problem turns into an engineering problem. "To me, when I look at [Yahoo's problems], I see engineering problems," Mayer says. "Those principles apply to everything from the culture of the company to how we grow our products." And she says that her experience as an engineer helps her approach those issues — being bold and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Mayer says that last year, for example, was a year of "experimentation in terms of Yahoo's content strategy, trying to figure out what peopl...
