Heidi Helfand: recommendation

Transcript context

…There's this idea of a startup within a big company. Everyone's like, "Oh, it's just like the startup within a big company. We have all the resources that we need. There's no less risk, but we can innovate and try new things." Rarely does it feel like it work out. You're sharing stories where it does. Is there anything you found or any advice for how to actually be successful in this idea of having a team off to the side doing something innovative and different? At AppFolio we did this. So there's a company called SecureDocs; it branched off into its own company and it was just acquired, I believe in 2022. When SecureDocs was happening, I was not on that team. I was on the other teams and I was watching, and again, same pattern. A team was created off to the side and they were given process freedom. They worked in more of a daily sprint style as opposed to the two-week sprint style that our other teams were doing at the time at early AppFolio. And so, one, isolate the team or put them in a different area. We could still see them. We were in this big open room, but it was their team area. I mean we had these impermanent walls between some of the teams. It was their region and they claimed it and they named themselves. And so, one, separate location. There's another story in the book about a team that incubated a product idea within Citrix and they were in a garage of all places, so they were really isolated. But just put the team in a different region, make it that area. That's number one. Number two, tell other people not to disturb this team. That's key. And hearing it from a leader is really, really important. No, you're not going to pull them into something else. They're working on this other thing. So people need to shed their skin of the other things that they're working on. If you take a bigger picture, kind of forest through the trees picture, you want people pairing and switching pairs so they're not single owners of the system. So when they have an opportunity to do something that could be really important to the company beyond one of these isolated teams, they can fade out and not be the only owner that has to transfer knowledge and then field questions for two years on how that system works. You want to build this redundancy in your teams. So that's like if you really want to plan ahead, do that first. Have that as part of how you operate, building this team redundancy and switching, because then it frees people to not be the only owner of a system and chained to a system. And so isolate them. Tell people not to bother them. Do pairing and have shared ownership so it's easier for somebody to switch into something like this. Process freedom. Again, they can do things differently. Ideally they report up to someone that really has decision-making authority and decisions won't get reversed. Or they have to go through some complex web of like, "Is it okay if we do this?" No, you need a clear decision-making structure. They saw that at the McDonald's case study as well, which is not in my book, but it's in [inaudible 00:30:52] book called Teamwork. And then that group, having that senior leader that they report into, getting the clear lines of communication there is also really important. k, but it's in [inaudible 00:30:52] book called Teamwork. And then that group, having that senior leader that they report into, getting the clear lines of communication there is also really important. So not having this heavyweight bureaucracy of, I don't know, quarterly business updates where everybody's making a slide deck for two years before they go to that meeting, trying to relieve the team of things like that and make it lighter. And some of these teams, like SecureDocs became another product at AppFolio that was very, very successful. At one point, I think it was before we went public, it branched off into its own separate entity. I think maybe they shared a board member or something. I don't know how that worked, but it became its own entity. SecureDocs became separate and then it grew from there. And then it became this wonderful successful product that was recently acquired. People come and go at companies and companies grow and change and morph, and that was one case of departures that it's like bitter, sweet. You're happy for your friends and colleagues say, "Oh, he's going to be a CTO. He's going to be the CTO." There's this entity. I remember visiting their office in Santa Barbara. It's great to see your friends succeed and thrive. And we developed other companies in that way.…

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