Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (B)

In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new advertising products, services, and go-to-market strategies. When Ana began her new position, she inherited two programs that had been initiated in the core business but had stalled. After researching previous innovation endeavors within Google Ads, Ana and her team started establishing a team culture, procedures, methodology, and metrics to carry out rigorous and disciplined sales innovation across their globally dispersed team. Over the following two years, the SAIL team encountered and overcame numerous challenges related to vetting ideas, managing communication with internal and external stakeholders, adapting experiments with agility, and graduating programs into the core business. In 2020, SAIL received a $1 million budget and was expected to initiate two new innovation programs by Q3 2020. The SAIL team was in the process of developing a new idea-intake process when Ana was assigned to a six-month rotation in a new role. Soon after, COVID-19 began to upend economies across the globe, and some team members became concerned about SAIL’s future. Prior to transitioning to her new position, Ana was determined that SAIL establish its intake process and had to select one of two proposals to implement.