Getting Seen, Getting Named

Two words came up more than I expected at Google — visibility and recognition. How work gets seen, and how a name gets said out loud.

Two words came up more often than I expected during my years at Google: visibility and recognition. Neither maps cleanly onto Korean — the closest I can get is making the work visible and making the name get said. They point at something past just doing the work you were handed: a little extra effort, in a particular direction. These are notes on that.

Visibility

Back in my Search days, a colleague — someone still doing important work now — said a thing that stuck with me. It loses something out of English, but the gist was: take the area you own — search queries — and go all the way on it, and own the visibility. Maybe it becomes a feature that makes life better for users; maybe it becomes the quality that returns the right answer every time. The point was to make it so that who owns this query? leads to what’s their name? You could call it a form of standing in the right line.

Cycles differ by project, but building a demo from the user’s point of view — one that catches the boss’s eye — is one good way. Unless you’re already known as the person, or the team, that does good work, you need to stand out, in the good sense, and hard evidence is always right. This is not the territory you fill by I ship 10x more PRs or I’m smart or I stay late and work hard.

The scale is different, but you get the mirror image once you’re in the boss’s seat. The higher you sit on the org chart, the more you have to take on and the more you have to see, and every time the same question comes up: who do I give this to? Was there something already? Whether to hand it to the person who does it well, or to spread it to the people who look less loaded, depends on the moment — but in my own experience I leaned toward the latter early on, and I lean toward the former now.

Recognition

The closest Korean word is chingchan — praise. It mostly happens when something goes well. For the record, a DM of encouragement, a quiet meal, a private bonus slipped to you on the side — none of that counts here. The goal is to make it known — to teammates, to neighboring teams, to the org head: our person is doing this, and doing it well.

Visibility has methods I can manufacture myself. Recognition gets its force when it comes out of someone else’s mouth. It’s hard to make happen with your own, which is exactly why managers have to mind it. Praise dropped in with no context is awkward and can chill the room. It also becomes ammunition at calibration, the meeting where managers reconcile ratings across teams.

At a global company like Google, saying a name correctly carried real weight. Nicknames and IDs already smooth most of it over, but in formal settings a lot of people made a genuine, meaningful effort to pronounce names right. Saying someone’s name clearly while you meet their eyes raised the level of respect a notch. I remember, with some pleasure, coaching an org head one name at a time — the teammates who’d be called out at the next all-hands — so he’d get each one right. For what it’s worth, Korean names are relatively not that hard, compared with some other countries.

Get Chaesang Jung’s stories in your inbox

Once you’ve gone through product manager training — APM, Google’s associate PM track — the launch announcement becomes a milestone of its own. There’s a craft to inscribing teammates’ names neatly, writing on behalf of the ### team; a name in the thanks to section of that letter lasts a long time. Google’s PM launch announcement and Amazon’s PRFAQ — the one-page press-release-and-FAQ they write before building anything — make a fun comparison, but that’s for another piece.

A good record with the company’s name plus your own name on it is a fine thing to set as the final goal of a project’s life cycle. Think of it at the same eye level as closing out research by getting a paper published with your name on it. Patents and papers might be in the original goals to begin with; but a mention in the news, or a post on the company blog, becomes a company asset, a company record — so it outlasts your moving teams, or even leaving. Personally, I’m still milking a blog post I wrote more than ten years ago. I just hope they never take it down.

A Few Programs I Remember

Google had a thing called a peer bonus. The amount drifted with the times, but it was roughly $100 after tax, sent as a gift. When someone on Team A wanted to recognize a member of Team B, they’d send a note — this went well because of them; recognize them — and ask Team B’s manager to approve. On approval, both teams got the thanks for recognizing them message, and the praise happened, naturally(?), on its own.

A notch milder was the kudos — the same thing with the cash removed, a freer kind of praise. It got used less, as I remember. You can imagine the various side effects.

These leave a record, stored as a sort of digital certificate, and stacked up they’re plainly good for a person. It doesn’t quite go as far as people comparing counts, but they make decent evidence of ordinary good citizenship. They don’t, however, work as something you set as a KPI in advance. Collect five kudos a quarter is awkward — and praising without these programs, going around asking for sign-off, gets awkward too.

And in Korea, in the AI Era

It feels natural that a large organization would need programs like these, and the deliberate effort behind them. But even at a small company, the places where communication simply doesn’t happen bothered me quite a bit. Remote work becomes the excuse sometimes; so does the working culture people file under MZ, Korea’s shorthand for its millennials and Gen Z. The basic questions: does anyone know who’s doing what, and who’s doing it well? If you wanted to know, could you find out? And from the other side — are individuals leaving their contributions behind as assets the team and the company keep?

Go smaller still: do AI agents, or sub-agents, know each other well? Looking at some of the agents lately that don’t quite seem to be on the same page, I find myself wondering what feedback would actually help. I do praise them now and then for good work — but I suspect that isn’t nearly enough.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/175