12 June 2024
There are four different kinds of R&D teams, each with very different actions and goals, and each with very different outcomes. The success of the team often depends on aligning the activities of the team with the intended goals, and it's actually quite reasonable for a company to have two or more teams, each operating independently and towards different ends. In this post, I explore the Spy Team.
As a reminder, there are four kinds of R&D Teams:
The spy team's purpose is pretty much as its name implies: Take a strong look at what competitors and adjacents are doing in your industry, and how they do (or might) affect your company's activities. The spy team doesn't get industry press articles written about the things they are doing, but they do often adopt a technology quickly enough to make a difference without paying the cost of finding all the mistakes and wrong assumptions about it.
The Problem: Technology is often seen as a competitive advantage by a number of companies, but an equally larger number of companies don't want to be the "first mover" in a technology space because of the costs involved in discovering how to apply something to their day-to-day operations. When the Web first became a "thing", for example, many companies ran to the Web with an idea of bringing a corporate "home page" (which was the principal use case for the Web browser at first) to the rest of the world. MySpace was the first in that regard, and built quite the comprehensive set of individuals' home pages as a result. But companies pretty quickly discovered that the real power of the Internet-connected web browser wasn't in showing off one's questionable design skills, but in the brand-new world of being able to sell things to people. MySpace was the first-mover, but very quickly discovered they had no real business model to lean on, while Amazon went on to become one of the biggest tech companies on the planet. Lesson learned: Don't be the first-mover. Wait for the first-movers to figure out everything wrong with a technology, then leverage that knowledge and experience (which is free to you now) and be the second-mover, but the vastly more efficient adopter, of a technology.
Successful Execution: The spy team's execution model is often cyclical, in which the team chooses a "target" for their activities, and engages in some "creative reconnaissance" to determine what that company is doing. This doesn't mean decking out tuxedo-clad actors in all the latest spy gadgets or engaging in questionably-legal corporate espionage. In many cases, it's as simple as looking at the company's careers page (to determine what they're hiring by looking at the "skills desired" section of each job listing), or "view source" on the company's various web properties, or even looking on LinkedIN at current employees and discovering what their posts tell you about what they're doing or using at work.
Then, once something new has been discovered, the spy team kicks into high gear, looking at the technology and the company's public statements and conversations around that technology. Competitor just adopted React? Cool--see if you can identify which team inside the company is using React, what they're using it for, and how the adoption seems to be going. Are any of the company's engineers or technical executives speaking at conferences? See if you can catch the video recording of the talk, and use that as a guide for what they might be using it for, and what "minefields" they ran into when they were using it. Simultaneously, of course, begin your own investigation into React itself, but always with an eye back to what the competitor is doing and saying, so that you can avoid the mistakes they've made.
Once you have a good sense of the technology and how it might (or might not) apply to your own company's problems, you shift into Scout Team mode: prepare a presentation, define a prototype, and work out an execution plan for transitioning to using the new technology within your own company's fabric.
Last modified 12 June 2024