How to run your product team like a research lab | Dan Shipper (Every)
Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of Every, argues that product teams should add a small research lab. The lab explores new AI models, so the main product team can keep shipping the roadmap without distraction.
The gist
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Shipper says exploring the AI frontier and executing a roadmap pull in opposite directions, so he splits them into a labs team and a product team.
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Shipper expects labs to throw away about 90% of experiments and product teams to adopt about 10%, and says one person can be a lab.
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He recommends two-slice teams of one or two people, pairing a messy pirate explorer with an architect who shapes the work into something lasting.
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Shipper fed three years of editor-in-chief Kate's copy edits to Fable, and the resulting internal tool cut her remaining work 12% month over month.
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Shipper says ideas should move through a weekly-reviewed pipeline, advancing if people keep using them, they're 10x better, and affordable, as with OpenAI's Codex.
Dan Shipper uses it
"We had Fable 5.1 launched last week and these are sick models. I made this Battle of Waterloo 3D historical reproduction that's historically accurate with a single prompt and it just ran for like 4 hours and then I got that. That's crazy."
▶ Play at 0:21251 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Chris Koerner, and This Week in Startups.
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"The composition that works for us — I call them pirates and architects. One person on the team is the pirate. They are slop cannons who are absolutely obsessed with finding valu..."
"You need to make a research pipeline where ideas start on the left as lab only, with lots of little experiments, and then you move them progressively from left to right. At some..."
"We had Fable 5.1 launched last week and these are sick models. I made this Battle of Waterloo 3D historical reproduction that's historically accurate with a single prompt and it..."
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