Building Innovative Teams, with Gill Haus

What does it take to build and maintain high-performing, innovative teams? That’s the question we tackle on this week’s episode of “The Innovation Engine” podcast. Gill Haus, CTO of Paid Services at AOL, joins us to talk about how to structure teams to ensure they are set up for success, why charisma is a must for any leader looking to lead successful teams, and why “agile” is as much a state of mind as it is a number of rules that are written in stone.

We draw on Gill’s leadership experience at companies like BillMeLater, PayPal, Taxi Magic, and AOL to find out what makes the most successful technology teams tick. At PayPal, Gill served as Director of Development Engineering and Senior Director of Product Development, roles in which he oversaw large development and architecture teams working on one of the most well-known electronic payment platforms in the world. At Taxi Magic, Gill was SVP of Technology and was responsible for all aspects of technology, including Product Development, Technology Strategy, Software Architecture, and more. In his role at AOL, Gill is responsible for Paid Services development and engineering.

Here are some highlights from this week’s episode:

• Gill talks about the kinds of teams he has led in building consumer-facing products for a number of leading brands
• We talk about the “pivot” that Taxi Magic made to go from enterprise expense management to a consumer-facing cab hailing service
• Gill shares why he thinks innovation is as much about getting out of the way of people who know what’s going on as anything
• We talk about the concept of “product-market fit” and what it means for those in the product development space
• Why Gill thinks that fear of failure is one of the most common roadblocks to innovation
• Gill talks about why he is bullish on the logistics space and how he thinks it will change transportation on demand and the world around us
• Finally, taking a page out of Jeff Foxworthy’s book, we play a word association game which makes for an interesting listen.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

Interested in hearing more? Tune in to the full episode of “The Innovation Engine” podcast  below.

About The Innovation Engine

Since 2014, 3Pillar has published The Innovation Engine, a podcast that sees a wide range of innovation experts come on to discuss topics that include technology, leadership, and company culture. You can download and subscribe to The Innovation Engine on Apple Podcasts. You can also tune in via the podcast’s home on Spotify to listen online, via Android or iOS, or on any device supporting a mobile browser.