Innovation by Isolation
The beneficial silo: how to actually make a startup-within-a-company work.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 94%
Conventional wisdom says de-silo everything. Helfand argues the opposite for new-product bets and emergencies: deliberately pull a small team off to the side, give it process freedom, protect it from interruption, and wire it to a senior decision-maker. The pattern only works if you set up five specific conditions — most 'startup within a company' efforts fail because they skip them.
Origin
Helfand's own experience on the isolated team at Expert City that produced GoToMyPC, plus the SecureDocs incubation at AppFolio and a Citrix product incubated in a garage. She traces the pattern back further: the Chicken McNugget was saved by an isolated SWAT team, documented in a 1970s book called Teamwork — 'we didn't make this up'.
Core principles
- 01Silos can be beneficial when there is a specific problem to solve.
- 02New products need faster iteration loops than the mature cadence of an existing product line.
- 03Executive sponsorship is what makes the isolation real — a manager doing it on the side won't be taken seriously.
- 04Isolation is also for emergencies: incidents, performance crises, a consultant plus a conference room for two weeks.
- 05Build knowledge redundancy in advance so people are free to leave their systems and join.
How to run it
- 1
Physically separate the team
Put the team in a different region, area, or room and let them claim it and name themselves. Different building, different floor, impermanent walls, even a garage — the point is a visible boundary.
Pro tip Letting the team name itself and own its territory accelerates the identity shift.
- 2
Tell everyone else not to disturb them — from a leader
The protection has to be voiced by a leader, not the team itself: no, you are not going to pull them into something else, they are working on this other thing. People need to shed their skin of prior commitments.
Watch out Without explicit leader-level protection, the isolated team gets drip-fed back into old work and the isolation is fictional.
- 3
Grant process freedom
Free the team from the org's standard cadence and artifacts. At Expert City that meant escaping waterfall and pixel-perfect Photoshop mockups; at AppFolio the SecureDocs team ran daily sprints while everyone else ran two-week sprints.
Pro tip Also relieve them of heavyweight bureaucracy — quarterly business updates and slide decks that eat weeks.
- 4
Report the team into a real decision-maker
The team should report up to someone with genuine decision-making authority, so decisions do not get reversed or dragged through a complex web of approvals. Clear lines of communication to that senior leader are essential.
Pro tip The McDonald's Chicken McNugget team reported straight up to an executive and worked in a different plant.
Watch out An executive sponsor is the single most important ingredient. Without one, nobody takes the team seriously.
- 5
Build pairing and shared ownership beforehand
Have people pair and switch pairs as a matter of routine so nobody is the single owner of a system. Then, when an isolated-team opportunity appears, they can fade out without a two-year tail of knowledge transfer and questions.
Pro tip If you really want to plan ahead, build this team redundancy first — before the opportunity arrives.
- 6
Plan the re-entry
Work out with the larger organization what happens to what the team builds. For short-term isolation especially, agree the hand-back so you don't create something in isolation that other people are stuck maintaining.
Watch out The classic failure: someone sells a feature, pulls in engineer friends to build it, and leaves it for uninvolved people to maintain. A big mess.
In the wild
After the tech-support marketplace was killed for making about six dollars in a month, a small team was pulled off to the side to run market validation (following Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany, pre-Lean Startup). Freed from waterfall, they deployed frequently and invented flows — down to the forgot-password flow — that did not yet have standard patterns.
→ They shipped GoToMyPC, the pivot that saved the company; the team was later folded back in and went on to build GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.
A team was created off to the side in its own claimed area of the open room, working in a daily sprint style while the rest of AppFolio ran two-week sprints.
→ SecureDocs branched off into its own separate entity and was acquired, reportedly in 2022.
As documented in the 1970s book Teamwork: McDonald's brought in a consultant, formed a very small team that worked in a different plant from the normal product development site, and had it report straight up to an executive, because the McNugget was struggling in its Indianapolis test market.
→ The Chicken McNugget survived — evidence the isolation pattern long predates modern startup practice.
Common mistakes
Isolation without executive sponsorship
A manager who spins up a side team on their own authority cannot protect it from interruption or prevent its decisions being reversed. Nobody takes the effort seriously and it dies quietly.
Building an orphan
An isolated team that ships something no one else agreed to own leaves a maintenance burden on people who had no say in the decisions. Agree the hand-back before you build.
Sourcing the team from single owners of systems
If the people you want are the sole owners of critical systems, they can't leave — or they leave and spend two years fielding questions. Redundancy has to be built before you need it.
Is it for you?
Best for
A company with an existing mature product line that needs to incubate a genuinely new product, run a pivot, or solve a crisis at a faster cadence than the mothership can move.
Not ideal for
Routine roadmap work on an existing product, or any effort where you cannot secure an executive sponsor and a clear hand-back plan.
From the transcript
“isolation is or innovation by isolation start a new team off to the side a beneficial Silo give that team process Freedom”
“put the team in a different region make it that area that's number one number two tell other people not to disturb this team that's…”
“isolate them tell people not to bother them um do pairing and have shared ownership”
“has that really has decision making Authority and decisions won't get reversed”
From the episode
The art and wisdom of changing teams
Heidi Helfand (author of Dynamic Reteaming)