|
|
|
|
|
|
by authorfly
550 days ago
|
|
|
How did you find this kind of team? I know you note B2B/unicorns can have these, but I have never found them myself. I find it difficult: Reach out to the CPO/CEO with something innovative or genuine passion for the industry area, and they either get you in excited and others in the C/tech suite are against you / already busy with projects, OR they see you as a threat and just talk to learn. I am also wary because I have seen such teams before (e.g. a HTML5 team, yes silly as it sounds, web sockets and SVG felt like they opened entire new ways of making games), and a data science team using BERT etc (outdated totally by ChatGPT and made useless). Likewise I lead a team to adapt React (before it was predominant) which helped, and I was liked on the team by most for helping them code with less bugs (some of the old guard did not like using React). However, once that happened, it was done. My managers were changed, for someone who loved making lots of plans. I then got over-managed to the point I changed my career as it was obvious this manager had no interest in any future risks in the next 3-5 years of their time in that seat. I just don't see stories where these teams somehow make a 2nd product for the company which actually successfully scales. They usually get eaten by being overtaken technically, or eaten by the main product. So what do you do after the "eaten" point? Does the company keep your around? |
|
|
1. Find product market fit
2. Get dominant market share
3. Work on the next cycle - the core business will go stale
4. Everything else in support - legal, finance, HR
Look for the Step 3. People think of experimental teams as the ones that build Gmail or Android, but they're more the ones building Gemini. It also happens quite early on, maybe as early as Series B companies.
You might want to avoid 'toy' teams. Gmail was probably the most successful toy project, but they're very rare.
One example is a product that has lots of TPV/GMV - payment gateways, marketplaces, listing sites. This usually doesn't translate to revenue/profit, but they're in a good position to sell things that are profitable.
Another is fixing problems in scale. Like FB was built on PHP which wasn't enough, so they ended up building Hack, React, a bunch of mobile stuff.
Some of the work is to build features requested by the core. An elliptical example here might be if you were Rolls-Royce and needed a specialized exhaust system, the specialist team would build it and then try to mass produce or sell that exhaust part to other companies.
There's going to be a lot of failed products and that's okay. The fail rate is usually higher than the core product, but lower than startups, so it's ideal for former startup folks.