Lenny Distilled

Small teams ship faster than big teams

Execution → Shipping Velocity

Supporting

Don't put too many resources against these bigger swings. Have them be small teams. And then also, just get customer feedback as quickly as possible. Don't wait until the thing is perfect. And that way, you can limit the risk.

Eeke de Milliano How to foster innovation and big thinking
Supporting

We started really small with all of these initiatives. So I think I mentioned, we really had one or two people working on each of these products for the first six months. So it was one engineer and one designer, or one engineer and one PM. And they really didn't get funding until it was clear that there was something there.

Eeke de Milliano How to foster innovation and big thinking
Supporting

We were really deliberate about keeping these teams separate from the rest of the org, especially early on. I think Retool Mobile's actually a really good example, where we had a lot of debate about whether or not we should build Retool Mobile out of the core web app builder. And we eventually decided that we were going to run it as a separate team, because we wanted the team to be able to move really, really quickly.

Eeke de Milliano How to foster innovation and big thinking