Adam Fishman on Why Most Innovation Labs Fail at Mozilla and Beyond

The Innovation Kevin Problem: Why Corporate Labs Keep Failing

Most big companies hire someone to run "innovation." They build slides. They get a lab. Nothing ships.

Adam Fishman calls this the Innovation Kevin problem. When he joined Mozilla as interim SVP of New Products, he found dozens of projects with no clear customer, no revenue model, and no end date. Teams had been working for months—sometimes with 50 or 75 people—on things that would never see the light of day.

When I came into the company, one of my jobs was to help us look at things retrospectively, retroactively, and go, is there anything here? Who are we selling this to? How will we make money from this? And a lot of times we didn't have answers to that question, and so it meant shut it down.

— Adam Fishman

The root cause? Mozilla had been funding projects based on cool technology or interesting technical problems—without grounding them in market reality or distribution strategy. Teams would build for months, then ask: "How do we make money from this?" That's backwards.

Stage-Gating: Venture Funding Rules for Corporate Innovation

Fishman introduced a five-stage framework that mirrors how venture capital works. Each stage has specific questions you must answer before unlocking more budget and headcount. It's designed to kill ideas fast or force rapid pivots—not let teams research forever.

Discovery and Exploration happen together in the first few months. Discovery asks: Is this problem worth solving by us? Is this an attractive market? Exploration asks: What could we build here? Teams prototype, test technical feasibility, and iterate on problem-solution fit. Maximum team size: 2 to 5 people. Ideally just a GM-type PM and a designer who can prototype.

Viability is where you validate product-market fit. You're getting real customers, iterating on feedback, proving it's worth scaling. This can take one to two years—but you're still lean. You're not throwing 50 people at it yet.

Growth is when you've got PMF and you're ready to scale distribution. Sustaining is the end of the S-curve: optimize for profitability and EBITDA. Mozilla hasn't pushed many products all the way to sustaining yet, but the framework gives teams a map.

I would rather prematurely shut something down than flail away at something that really didn't have any long-term vision for 12 months without any end in sight. It actually doesn't help anyone to do that.

— Adam Fishman

You Don't Need 20 Customer Interviews. You Need 6.

One of the biggest traps in early-stage product work is using research to avoid making decisions. Teams say they need six weeks of research. They want 20 interviews. They're chasing certainty that doesn't exist.

Fishman's rule: talk to six companies that would be customers. If they say it's a big problem, you're good. Move forward. You don't need more validation at that stage.

You can answer these questions within a 2-week time frame. Within fewer than 20 interviews. And in fact, more than that. When I got here, we had a research person who was like, oh, I'm gonna go do research on this. It's going to be 6 weeks. And I was like, we don't have 6 weeks. So what can we get done in 2 or 1?

— Adam Fishman

The other unlock? AI makes prototyping absurdly fast now. The bottleneck isn't building anymore. It's distribution. So in the exploration phase, you must have a hypothesis for how you'll get this into people's hands. Enterprise B2B? Product-led growth? Browser integration? You don't need proof, but you need a theory.

Hire Founders, Not Feature PMs

Mozilla now optimizes for hiring serial founders who've exited small companies. Not billion-dollar exits—those people aren't looking for jobs. But people who've done the grind: acquired the first customers, figured out GTM, built something to enough scale that someone bought it.

If you've never had to think about distribution before, it's uncomfortable. If you've built a zero-to-one company, you know what the job entails.

The Existential Pressure You're Missing

Zero-to-one is hard inside a stable company because there's no existential pressure. A founder outside the company has constant time pressure and constant we're-going-to-run-out-of-money pressure. If they don't figure something out, the company dies.

Inside a big company, teams can research forever. They can flail for 12 months. Stage-gating solves this by imposing artificial constraints: you have two weeks to answer this question, or we're not doing it at all. That framing forces teams to cut the fat and focus on what actually matters.

It's not about creating PTSD. It's about replicating the forcing function that makes startups move fast. The alternative is Innovation Kevin: great slides, no shipping, wasted budget.