Teamwork is the norm, especially for big projects. Keith Coleman, a 26-year-old product manager who works on Gmail, oversees a ten-person secret project whose team members have taken over their own conference room. "They've given up their big space to be crammed into this room to get things done," says Coleman.

The hideaway happens to be where Gmail's chat function was created. Lounge music is usually playing, engineers wander in and out, and there's no formal daily meeting, though the team tends to congregate between five and seven in the evening. "If I could capture anything that's great about Google," says Coleman, "it's that room."

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