Anthropic's team of idealistic researchers represented a high-variance bet for investors. The same qualities that could have caused failure—a non-traditional, research-first approach—are precisely what enabled breakout innovations like Claude Code, which a conventional product team would never have conceived.

The most effective team structure for new AI products involves a "co-founder" pairing. One person is a designer who can also build and rapidly prototype ideas. The other is a traditional software engineer who follows behind, ensuring the underlying architecture is robust and scalable, effectively "paving the trail."

The most successful companies deploying AI use a "leadership lab and crowd" model. Leadership provides clear direction, while the entire organization is given access to tools to experiment and discover novel use cases. An internal team then harvests these grassroots ideas for strategic implementation.

The "ICCPO" (Individual Contributor Chief Product Officer) model requires leaders to use AI tools to self-serve answers directly from company data. This shifts the executive role from pure delegation to hands-on experimentation, modeling a culture of self-sufficiency and inspiring the team to adopt new tools.

In an AI company, product discovery is tied to latent model capabilities. Legora's structure reflects this with a minimal product management layer. Instead, technical, research-led engineering teams directly translate model advancements into customer solutions.

The traditional PM function, which builds sequential, multi-month roadmaps based on customer feedback, is ill-suited for AI. With core capabilities evolving weekly, AI companies must embed research teams directly with customer-facing teams to stay agile, rendering the classic PM role ineffective.

Anthropic leverages the low cost of execution in the AI era by building multiple potential product versions simultaneously. This "build all candidates" approach replaces lengthy spec-writing and low-bandwidth customer research, allowing them to pick the best functioning prototype directly.

Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.

A truly product-driven culture involves everyone, not just designers and product managers. At Amo and Zenly, a deep connection between all teams was crucial, with many innovative product ideas originating from unexpected places like the backend engineering team, who were deeply involved in shaping the user experience.