Frederick: Corporate R&D teams fail unless tied to core mission and shared wins
Adriel Frederick · Humanizing product development | Adriel Frederick (Reddit, Lyft, Facebook) · Oct 20, 2022 · at 9:23
Adriel Frederick, VP of Product at Reddit X and former product director at Lyft, outlines how companies can structure new R&D incubation units without triggering resentment or rejection from core operational teams.
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“So first is the rest of the company needs to see what you're doing as being core and critical to the mission. It can't seem like these guys are just playing off in a corner on something that isn't related to what we are doing every day. Cause I think that leads to some of the like resentment. Cause you can imagine any team internally is fighting for resources and they look at this group as having resources that they can't get. They're like, ah, we gotta get rid of that because they're not helping us do what we are here to do. So you have to be part of the core mission. Otherwise you're gonna have problems culturally with that. So I think that's one thing. The second is it has to be everyone's success. So if you end up doing something on one of these R and D teams, it should just be the R and D team that wins. Everyone should feel like they win. And that is kind of related to that first goal I was talking about. I think the third is you have to set up the work that these teams are doing such that people don't believe all innovation is going to happen on that team. It can't be that like, okay, we're just stuck with the operational stuff and they're getting to have all the fun. Other teams are still going to innovate, but maybe we're taking on something that other teams still have capacity for that the organization needs. And it's part of the core mission.”
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