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Back to Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio), with Josh Woodward.

How Do You Set Up an Internal Labs Team?

Josh Woodward gives three tips for anyone setting up an internal labs team. Give it a space where weird things can grow, decide what winning looks like, and use the lab to challenge how the company works.

The team cannot nestle under an existing business unit. It needs its own independence, and in some companies that means reporting to the CEO or sitting far enough away from the core. The people running it need a users-first mindset. At Google the order is users first, Google second, Labs third: the job is to make users successful and make Google successful. Be clear whether the goal is to graduate things into existing products or to invent new product lines and categories. Google Labs started as a graduation lab and later expanded because AI transforms and blurs a lot of categories. The setup is isolated in some way and still part of the same team.

A lab is also for more than product development and technology exploration. It can challenge how the company works and how things happen.

Grokipedia·Josh Woodward·Google Labs

Transcript

Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio) ·

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

More from this episode

  1. Where Do Google's Best Ideas Come From?Josh Woodward says the best ideas to come out of labs, and out of Google more broadly, arrive from a variety of places.
  2. What Is Google Labs' Almost Possible Framework?Josh Woodward says Google Labs keeps a list of what is almost possible and watches for the moment an experience crosses into something a team can build.
  3. How Do You Spot Product-market Fit Early?Josh Woodward spots early product-market fit by watching people's eyes, because the early read is way more art than science.
  4. When Should You Kill a Product Idea?Josh Woodward kills a product idea when the team already knows it is failing, usually before the leader does.
  5. What Skills Are Rising in Value in the AI Era?Josh Woodward looks for mispriced signals in the people around him, past the usual talk of taste, judgment, and vibe coding.
  6. Should Every Employee Become a Builder?Josh Woodward says people are overhyping the idea that everybody is a builder and that the new job is all the same.
  7. Why Does Every Company Need a Frontier Team?Josh Woodward says every company needs a set of people whose job is the frontier.
  8. Will Google Have 10,000 Products or Five?Josh Woodward keeps switching his answer in a long-running debate with Logan Kilpatrick about whether Google will have 10,000 products or five in five years.
  9. Why Does Google Labs Hand Out Miniature Rakes?Josh Woodward gives Google Labs teammates a little miniature rake and a cash reward when they do the grungy work of reclaiming TPUs.

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