Neo spends a lot of time working with large companies on new product innovation. One question we often get is how to best structure roles and teams. Here are a few high-level bullets:
Senior Executive’s Role:
- define the vision and desired outcomes
- allow the team to explore and define the solution
- create funding structure and timing “gates”
- provide physical infrastructure
- provide permission to fail (but require learning and iteration)
- create a sandbox from legal, compliance and at-scale operational requirements
- provide air cover for “scrappy” methods and tools, including technology tools
- provide access to mentoring
The Intrapreneurial Team:
Phase: Initial Exploration & Validation
- 1 product manager
- 1 designer
- 1 engineer
- 1 subject matter expert (if this is not the product manager)
Note: this team will be more effective if the people are scrappy and have cross-functional skill sets. This team might also need some part-time assistance from other parts of the organization (for example, analytics, marketing, etc)
Phase: Deeper Validation
The concept has passed the initial phase and now you want to create a more robust “minimum viable product”.
- augment the initial team only as needed for the MVP (for example, an extra engineer or content specialist)
- depending on the concept, you might need some resources to help integrate to corporate data systems
Phase: Productize & Integrate
- keep as much of core team as possible (now domain experts)
- augment with additional resources as needed to scale and integrate to corporate data systems
The more focused the teams are, i.e. not a matrix structure where people are juggling multiple projects and goals, the more effective this will be throughout the process.