Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of Every, presented a strategy for building products on what he termed a "moving frontier," arguing against the "unreasonable ineffectiveness of business as usual" during rapid technology revolutions, particularly concerning AI. He highlighted the transformative power of recent AI advancements, such as Fable 5.1 and Astra 6, showcasing capabilities like creating historically accurate 3D battle scenes from prompts, running complex agent simulations, and performing advanced video editing and presentation animation.
Shipper identified a core challenge for product leaders: the inherent conflict between executing an existing product roadmap and simultaneously exploring the rapidly evolving technological frontier. Exploration is divergent, experimental, and involves high rates of discarding ideas, while execution is convergent, focused, and demands reliable delivery. He cautioned against relying solely on customer feedback, as most customers are unfamiliar with cutting-edge AI capabilities and look to product teams for direction.
His proposed solution is to integrate research lab elements into the product organization, specifically by forming dedicated "labs teams." This approach allows for a clear separation of concerns: product teams can focus on improving and scaling existing offerings, while labs teams concentrate on exploring what new models make possible. Shipper emphasized that AI significantly lowers the barrier to entry, enabling even a "labs team of one" to achieve substantial exploration with powerful new tools. This structure effectively harnesses "early adopters" within the organization—individuals already experimenting with new tech—without distracting the entire product team from its core mission.
The expectations for these two types of teams differ significantly: labs teams might expect to discard 90% of their creations, while product teams would integrate only about 10% of successful lab innovations. He cited examples like Anthropic Labs, which developed major products such as Claude Code and Cloud Design through experimental groups, and OpenAI, where a small Codex team's desktop app eventually merged into ChatGPT, becoming its foundation and scaling to 800 million daily active users.
Shipper outlined key best practices for running a lab:
1. **Very Small Teams:** Advocating for "two-slice teams" (1-2 people), contrasting them with the traditional "two-pizza team" (8-10 people), due to the efficiency AI offers.
2. **Pirates and Architects:** Pairing an exploratory "pirate" who seeks value with an "architect" who shapes messy prototypes into valuable, extensible systems.
3. **Dogfooding:** Building for internal use to create the tightest possible feedback loops, or collaborating closely with early adopter customers.
4. **Parallel Experiments:** Pursuing multiple, even competing, approaches to a problem to effectively map the unknown technological frontier.
5. **Net Positive ROI:** Ensuring that even discarded experiments provide value, such as generating external content, feeding early adopter programs, or informing the broader product team about new capabilities.
To transition innovations from the lab to the main product, Shipper detailed a "research pipeline." Ideas progress from lab-only experiments to internal use, then to early customer testing, and finally to scaled release. He illustrated this with an internal project to automate copy edits for his editor-in-chief, Kate. Initially, he used Fable to replicate her editing style. Once functional, it transitioned to an "every agent" for internal team use, performing "Kate passes" on drafts. An architect then helped refine this into a system that tracks effectiveness, showing a 12% reduction in Kate's post-agent editing work. The goal is now to offer this process to early customers.
Shipper concluded by recommending best practices for managing this pipeline: regular reviews, defining clear decision criteria for advancement (e.g., internal adoption, 10x improvement over existing solutions, affordability at scale), and merging successful projects ("winners") into the main product. This strategy, he asserted, enables organizations to proactively build the next version of their product and embrace new technological shifts with excitement rather than apprehension.