Yahoo!

I brought my team into an improv class.

Not because we wanted to perform. Because we needed to think together better.

At the time, the problem wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was what happened to those ideas once they entered the room.

They stalled. They fragmented. They died quietly under scrutiny.

This sat inside work on Yahoo! frontdoor experiences, including the homepage, MyYahoo!, and Yahoo360°. The scale changed the stakes. Nearly a billion unique users visited each month, so even small decisions had wide reach.

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Improv has a rule.

“Yes, and.”

We used it to change how ideas moved through the team while designing at that scale.

It’s simple. It’s also difficult.

You don’t evaluate the idea. You accept it, and you extend it.

Not because every idea is good, but because momentum matters more than precision in the early phase.

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What became clear quickly:

Most teams don’t struggle with creativity.

They struggle with continuity.

An idea appears. Someone evaluates it. Another person redirects it. A third person reframes it. Within seconds, the original thread is gone.

What looks like collaboration is often interruption.

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In improv, interruption breaks the scene.

On a team, it breaks the thinking.

The exercise wasn’t about being funny. It was about staying in the thread long enough to see where it leads.

That requires a different discipline.

Not:

• “Is this right?”
• “Is this the best idea?”

But:

• “What happens if we continue this?”

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Something shifts when that becomes the default.

Ideas last longer.

People build on each other instead of competing for position.

The room stops optimizing for correctness and starts optimizing for progression.

That shift mattered. It changed how we generated and tested ideas before they reached A/B experiments.

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This changed how I think about teams.

Good systems don’t just produce output.

They create conditions where thinking can extend.

Where an idea can survive long enough to become something else.

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This shows up in my work in a practical way.

I design collaboration the same way I design interfaces:

• reduce premature evaluation
• preserve continuity
• create space for ideas to evolve before they are judged

Because once evaluation enters too early, the system collapses into caution.

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We didn’t go to Stanford to learn improv.

We went to understand what happens when thinking is allowed to continue under real constraints.

That approach carried into the product. At Yahoo! scale, preserving continuity early meant better decisions when they reached millions of users.