From Idea to Pilot in Six Weeks: Palantir’s Innovation Experiment

We are in a moment of economic turbulence, prompting organizations across industries to re-evaluate their strategies and offerings. Here at Palantir.net, we are facing the same winds, and have invested in this moment as an opportunity to better solve problems that matter.

We experimented with a focused, high-intensity approach to innovation, and launched an internal "skunkworks" program over Spring 2025. Our mission? Rapidly explore new products, services, and business approaches. We knew we would need to address the evolving needs of our clients. We also wanted to leverage the transformative power of emerging technologies like Generative AI.

Here’s a glimpse into our journey, and what happened.

The skunkworks experiment

We recognize the need to adapt our consultancy in the face of economic shifts. We gathered 14 team members across disciplines for six weeks and immersed this team in a structured environment designed for rapid innovation. 

This included dedicated weekly time for planning, building, testing, reflecting, and sharing – all self-organized. Along the way, we evaluated our concepts as they evolved, playtested with prototypes, talked to people outside the team, and learned to fail forward, letting go of ideas that didn’t pass criteria.

Methodology mashup 

We leaned heavily on proven methodologies:

• Design Sprints & Design Thinking: Understanding user needs, generating hypotheses, and rapidly prototyping solutions.
• Lean Entrepreneurship: Emphasizing validated learning and iterative development.
• Product Management Principles: Ensuring a focus on value creation and market viability.

Tangible outcomes

• From approximately 40 initial concepts, five compelling pitches emerged.
• Two of these pitches secured internal funding and are now on track to become ready-to-pilot productized services by the end of Q2 2025.
• The number of team members integrating generative AI into their work grew from 20% to 80% of the team, a remarkable increase. Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks and other AI tools became part of the team's workflows. Discovery, problem-solving, and prototyping were all augmented by the AI tools (with human oversight and validation).

A profound mindset shift addressing meaningful solutions

The program fostered a positive culture in a dynamic, high-stakes environment. We embraced collaboration, continuous learning, agile problem-solving, and adaptability - and we had some fun with each other.

Our skunkworks initiative wasn't just about generating new ideas; it was about tackling real challenges our clients face every day. Two key problem areas became the focus of our initial funded projects:

• Revolutionizing content audits: Undergoing a digital transformation typically means undergoing a painful, extended (or incomplete) content audit for both our team and clients. We understand the immense pain and effort involved – so we’re developing an AI agent, built using Drupal's AI module, to streamline the audit part of the process. We believe the result is a quicker, more comprehensive, and more cost-efficient audit. It also ensures that content strategy aligns with user needs and business objectives and our team of experts can focus on the exciting strategic work with our clients!
• "Done-For-You" digital transformation: Budgets are shrinking, and compliance demands are growing. This brought an opportunity to leverage nearly 20 years of experience creating secure, best-in-class Drupal websites. We used a Large Language Model (LLM) to analyze our vast project repository and identified the reusable patterns, then used what we learned to create an "80% done" extensible web build foundation. This significantly reduces time-to-delivery for us, and for our clients it will mean more focus on the bespoke work that addresses their unique challenges. We believe it will also help reduce decision fatigue, and open doors to new project opportunities for us as a company.

My reflections as the Innovation Facilitator

Designing and leading this program was an exhilarating and demanding experience. We were charting new territory within the organization. We needed to rapidly adapt our processes and mindsets. The unwavering support of our CEO was instrumental, as it allowed us the flexibility needed to shape the program as we went.

The initial one-week design sprint was intense, but it served us well as a mini exercise in design thinking. We aligned with one another, surfaced critical problems, and created initial concepts. Over the following weeks, we learned, iterated, adapted, and shared our progress with the wider organization.

Having run adaptation programs in the past, it’s clear to me that this six-week burst allowed us to be concentrated and powerful. We had a tight timeframe, but the dedicated daily and weekly focus enabled the team to accelerate and iterate at a pace that a more drawn-out approach wouldn't have achieved.

It was truly inspiring to witness my teammates unleash their creativity and expertise. These were problems they deeply understood and were passionate about solving. The depth of the dialogue we got into was a clear indicator of how engaged and invested we all were.

One of our key takeaways was the impact of dedicating a significant portion (one-third) of our company's talent to this focused effort. The results - two new products, plus a few sleepers in backlog - speak for themselves. As we move through the pilot development phase, the team has distilled their next steps into a simple heuristic: plan, do the work, include others, and keep learning. 

I am immensely proud of the team’s growth. They are tackling impactful problems and embodying an innovative spirit. This skunkworks initiative isn't just a program. It’s a testament to our commitment to continuous evolution and our belief in the power of focused collaboration. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the products we’re developing, drop us a line. Onwards to the next chapter!