As a junior IC at Instagram, Adrian was told leadership had "bigger fish to fry" than his A/B testing idea. He built a scrappy, functional prototype anyway, recruiting a PM for air cover. This bottoms-up initiative proved its value and ultimately led to his first senior promotion.
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To speed up Ring, returning founder Jamie Siminoff bypassed traditional management layers. He elevated high-potential, more junior employees to report directly to him, not as managers, but as individual contributors running key initiatives. This broke up hierarchies and increased ownership.
A product manager's casual comment to an engineer about combining parts led to the engineer building a functional prototype overnight using existing components and a 3D printer. This tangible model quickly gained executive attention and became the basis for a formal project, bypassing typical ideation hurdles.
To overcome corporate inertia and fear of failure, middle managers should form a "coalition of the willing" with a few coworkers. They can build a simple prototype on their own time and then present the tangible result to leadership, opening doors for more resources.
Don't pitch big ideas by going straight to the CEO for a mandate; this alienates the teams who must execute. Instead, introduce ideas casually to find a small group of collaborative "yes, and" thinkers. Build momentum with this core coalition before presenting the developed concept more broadly.
When facing internal resistance to a big idea, the tendency is to make the idea smaller and safer. The better approach is to protect the ambitious vision but shrink the steps to validate it, using small, targeted experiments to build evidence and momentum.
Avoid hiring a growth leader with a big-name pedigree for your early team, as they are often unsuited for the necessary hands-on experimentation. Instead, seek young, hungry builders who are motivated by chaos and comfortable rebuilding their own work as the company's needs evolve.
To bypass subjective debates and gain influence, junior engineers can build prototypes for all competing technical approaches. By presenting concrete, comparative evidence after hours, they demonstrate immense value and can quickly establish themselves as technical authorities, accelerating their path to leadership.
At Crisp.ai, the core value is that the best argument always wins, regardless of who it comes from—a new junior employee or the company founder. This approach flattens hierarchy and ensures that the best ideas, which often originate from those closest to the product and customers (engineers, PMs), are prioritized.
When an engineering team is hesitant about a new feature due to unfamiliarity (e.g., mobile development), a product leader can use AI tools to build a functional prototype. This proves feasibility and shifts the conversation from a deadlock to a collaborative discussion about productionizing the code.
Middle managers often feel threatened by new ideas from their teams and become innovation blockers. A pragmatic solution shared by one executive is for frontline employees to bypass this layer and seek approval for experiments directly from senior leadership, who are often more receptive.