What is a pod?

I just had a great question about pods. Someone said to me, "I haven't found a satisfactory answer to what a pod is. Is its primary concern a project? A business unit? A particular business outcome? Should we try to put everyone in a pod?"

It's a great question and I thought I'd share my answer here.

The core concern of a pod is actually innovation. In order to be able to innovate, any business group must have permission and the ability to innovate at the edge of the organization, the boundary between the company and the customer. This may include the ability to change a product or service, change pricing strategies and business models, to try new and different things that include the possibility of failure. In order to mitigate risk to the core business there will always need to be some kind of boundaries or limits, within which experiments can be conducted safely. These need to be clearly communicated.

So a pod is any business unit that has the autonomy to interact directly with customers and make decisions (within boundaries) based on what they have learned. They must have permission to experiment and they need to be structured in such a way that they can innovate at the "front line" of the business -- the boundary between the company and customers. This can take on a number of forms.

In some cases might be internal customers. For example, an IT group in a larger org where pods have sufficient autonomy to experiment and innovate in how they respond to internal customer needs.

So, I s a pod a startup, a project, a business unit, an outcome? As long as the above criteria are met, the answer is yes! All of the above.