If you were to build the team like this again, somewhere, it was kind of R&D horizon three or two teams. It's critical that the team who is taking over from the R&D shop feels like they have control over their own future. You can't really delegate roadmap to an R&D team. Engineering fundamentals in a lot of ways are the contracts that differentiate an R&T team from an operational product team.
Ryan J. Salva is the VP of Product at GitHub, where he led the incubation and launch of Copilot. Copilot uses OpenAI’s ML engine to suggest code and entire functions in real time, right from your editor, and is changing the way we build software. Ryan is an experienced developer and product manager, with over a decade of experience working for Microsoft before moving to lead the GitHub product team. In today’s episode, he shares how Copilot got its start, how it moved from prototype to live product, and how he structures R&D teams within larger companies. He also discusses the ethical questions surrounding AI use and how to build a successful product team, and shares the inside story of the development of Copilot.