Tom Coates
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Yahoo! Brickhouse

Product lead at Yahoo's rapid-innovation studio in San Francisco.

Yahoo! Inc.
Brickhouse Studio
Fire Eagle · MyBlogLog · Hack-day tools
a small, semi-detached team, three shipped experiments

Brickhouse was Yahoo's answer to a very 2008 problem: how does a company with a hundred million users still move like six people in a garage? The studio was set up as a semi-detached skunkworks — small teams, short leashes, real users, and permission to ship something and find out if it mattered before anyone had time to build a committee around it.

As product lead there I worked across a run of small, fast experiments — Fire Eagle among them — each one built to answer a specific question about where the web (and Yahoo) might go next, rather than to hit a roadmap line.

IMG PLACEHOLDER — Office / team photo
Year
2008
Role
Head of Product
Location
San Francisco
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