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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I was in a group a bit like that. It was small product-focused R&D team of ~6 people, charged with figuring out an emerging disruptive industry change, and building a new product line for that. (The rest of the company was directed not to even allude to our existence, since that might interfere with sales of the current products, and we even had a stealthy group name.) Except for me, who was the token enthusiastic kid, it was hand-picked from among the top engineers in the company.

This particular group had a manager. One of my favorite bosses, who was very sharp as both engineer and manager, honest, humble, and supportive (and formative of some of my ideas of what I should aspire to).

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> charged with figuring out an emerging disruptive industry change

And did you? — I'm really curious as to whether there ended up being a positive ROI from dedicating those top engineers to that task.

Yes, we figured it out. The ROI question is complicated (and I'm a techie, not an MBA). At some point, old product line management appeared and took over everything about the new product line, bringing in much/most of the company's engineers and managers. I stayed on for this new phase. I later had a rapport with some people who'd had executive-level visibility, who confided a few bits of why some things happened, but I don't have enough information (nor MBA qualifications) to distill useful lessons from that here. I'll just say my sense is that the original team performed well for the organization, and then organization things changed outside the team.

My personal ROI: moving to that group might've been the best decision I ever made. I learned a tremendous amount, got to work with great people, and afterwards it catapulted my career in the direction I wanted to go. Had I not been determined to go to grad school, I would've followed the original team lead anywhere.

How did you find working in that environment compared to some other projects with clearer direction?

I loved it. I think the team lead managed it well. It helped that we already had insight into the old problem domain, and how it was changing. And experienced engineers can generally collaborate effectively, as well as work self-directed.

It's not that different than any project with a novel component. Some projects ("Uber, for cats!") are mostly a matter of executing in some well-understood ways as soon as you hear the idea (set up your tools, use these frameworks, on this cloud configuration, and have frontend and backend start grinding through the tasks, while you're plugging them into the plan, and scheduling for demos or MVP launch or whatever). But other projects have more upfront domain knowledge to acquire, brainstorming, requirements analysis, market analysis, prototyping, figuring out possibilities, deciding what you will do, etc. In the latter, eventually it probably turns into a conventional fairly predictable project (although there might still be tricky problems to solve in the pieces, but you have a good idea where you want to go and what the pieces are).

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