Google Health claims its first victim

Just as we predicted, the Google Health project has killed off one top exec. And in record time, too! Head of the project Adam Bosworth has decided to move on from the company once he gets back from vacation. Now in charge? One Marissa Mayer, long the object of Valleywag's fascination. While the powers that be will try to spin this as a promotion, we think that Marissa might want to dust off the old resume. Becoming the head of health is the tech equivalent of being named the drummer for Spinal Tap. After the jump, the email explaining the management change sent to all Google Health beta testers.

Dear Trusted Testers:

Some of you may have recently seen the news about Adam Bosworth. Adam has decided to pursue other opportunities and is currently on vacation. While we are sad to see Adam go as he is a great talent and was instrumental in starting Google Health, we will be moving forward with our product plans and are 100% committed to health. Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience and Adam's former manager at Google is leading the health team. Marissa had been keeping track of our product progress through weekly meetings with Adam and myself and other key Product Managers.

For those of you who may not know Marissa - she is best known for being the first female engineer at Google and helped launch Web Search. She currently owns the User Interface design for all search related products and manages over over a 100 Product Managers at Google who in turn influence thousands of engineers. She is known throughout the tech industry for her expertise in user interface design and user experience and has also been widely quoted and featured in prominent publications such as Newsweek ("10 Tech Leaders of the Future"), Red Herring ("15 Women to Watch"), Business 2.0 ("Silicon Valley Dream Team"), BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Fast Company. Her bio is included below to help you get familiar with her.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/execs.html#marissa

We also have recently added staff to the health team and we want to introduce you to them as you will be working with them on testing. Jerry Lin, M.B.A. recently joined Google as a Product Manager and will be managing coding and UI. Maneesh Arora, a seasoned Product Manager at Google, has come over to the health team and will be working on partner support and scaling our Third Party partner services. Roni Zeiger, M.D. will continue to work on the Health Guide and I will continue to be involved with partner integration. As many of you know, we launched our product internally for testing to a subset of Google employees on August 16, 2007. We are continuing to get feedback from employees and will be expanding the number of employees who can test in the next few weeks.

If you have any further questions about our staffing, feel free to contact my colleague Missy Krasner at missy@google.com

Thank you again for your ongoing support.

Eric Sachs
Product Manager
Google

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