Adobe's Chief Strategy Officer On How AI Will Change R&D, How a $7.3B Startup Builds Product - Tactician #0042

24/01/2024

ADOBE’S CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER ON HOW AI WILL CHANGE R&D

Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe, explores how breakthrough AI technology will revolutionize R&D processes, enhance security, and reshape societal interactions in “The Rise of Open-Sourced R&D, How Communal Resourcefulness Will Protect Us, & Wild Data Provocations”

• Transition to Open-Sourced R&D: Belsky highlights the shift from traditional R&D to a model where customers drive innovation using AI tools.

  • "The next generation of product development and brand partnership exploration, especially among consumer brands, will increasingly be done by customers using AI creative tools, validated on social platforms, and then executed by companies... as the tools for idea expression are accessible and commoditized thanks to generative AI models and easy-to-use web-based tools, there is very little friction for expressing an idea visually [...] Brands can leverage this social traction as a form of validation and bring the idea into their advanced R&D pipeline."

• Community Curation and the Role of Credible Mass: Belsky discusses the importance of community curation in idea validation, distinguishing between 'critical mass' and 'credible mass'.

  • "Community curation with the 'credible mass' overpowering the 'critical mass'... As algorithms mature, I suspect social platforms will make a new set of sorting and filtering tools available for enterprise customers who want to sort through content in new ways... Brands want to know what 'tastemakers' prefer, and social platforms have an opportunity to help brands differentiate between the credible mass and the critical mass."

• Taste Over Skills in the Age of AI: He argues that in the AI era, taste and ingenuity might be more important than traditional skills.

  • "Perhaps taste and ingenuity are far more important than skills in the age of AI? Taste seems more scarce these days, and is an increasingly differentiating trait as skills-based productivity is offloaded to compute... Having taste and leveraging AI is our ultimate defense against being replaced by AI."

• Communal Resourcefulness for Security: Belsky highlights how communal resourcefulness, such as shared block lists, can enhance security in the AI era.

  • "Communal resourcefulness, in the form of shared block lists and threat filter models, will foster a more secure future... This form of 'community resourcefulness' is essential to learn from the vulnerabilities faster than the vulnerabilities become best practices for bad actors."

HOW A $7.3B STARTUP BUILDS PRODUCT

Lenny Rachitsky, Author at Lenny’s Newsletter, interviews Eilon Reshef, Co-Founder at Gong to understand how Gong structures its product teams, plans its cycles, and approaches product development and design in “How Gong builds product”

• Annual and Quarterly Planning Cycles:

  • "We have two main planning cycles: annual and quarterly... It starts at the top, with the Gong management team setting up top company priorities... Based on these priorities, product and engineering determine the capacity for the different products and product areas... Initially, a straw-man plan is built (bottom-up), with the 'big rocks' that are planned for the year. It is presented to the leadership team for high-level feedback. Then a more detailed plan is put together. That plan includes more specific feature descriptions and more concrete timelines... The output of this process is guidance for the plan one year ahead, at a decreasing level of certainty: good certainty for the upcoming quarter, lower certainty the following quarter, and a very rough sketch of the second half. Once the plan is prepared, it is communicated broadly throughout the company... Each quarter, we run a trimmed-down version of this process. We then create a pretty substantial document—north of 20 pages—that details the plan and what is expected to be built during the upcoming quarter... We also provide an abridged version of the high-level rocks, for executive consumption."

• Structure of Product Teams:

  • "When we started Gong, I built what we now call a pod... Later on, as we started to scale, we debated how to structure the pods... we realized that we wanted to optimize for customer-centricity and velocity instead of optimizing for specialization... So we’ve continued to build autonomous multi-skill teams (pods) around product areas... Each pod is focused on a problem area"

• Product/Design Review Meetings:

  • "We are relatively extreme in letting the teams autonomously drive their own agendas... once a pod has been assigned an area of responsibility, a great outcome is that they come up with the respective product design. So the leadership team is hardly involved in the detailed design or the iterations with customers along the way."

• Approach to OKRs and Scrum:

  • "We do not plan monthly or biweekly. Both the engineering leader and I dislike the Scrum methodology... And by forcing 'commitment' to deliverables within a time window, it essentially inhibits on-the-fly trade-offs between content, quality, and timelines."

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