What does it take to build something genuinely new inside a $60B Enterprise? In this podcast hosted by Sid Shaik, Outshift by Cisco VP & CPO Papi Menon breaks down how product leaders can drive meaningful innovation inside massive enterprises, and why the future depends on incubating bold bets like agentic AI and quantum networking. He shares how to identify ideas worth pursuing, how to navigate internal pressure from sales and the board, and how to create strategic optionality that reshapes a company’s trajectory. This is essential listening for product leaders looking to understand what high-stakes innovation actually demands.
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Show Notes
- Success metrics for innovation inside a $60B company look nothing like startup KPIs. Early revenue, adoption, or traction are not meaningful indicators at Cisco scale.
- Internal incubation serves one purpose: creating strategic optionality for the core business.
- Every new venture must define what success is not before defining what success is.
- Innovation at enterprise scale requires constant iteration on metrics, personas, and market signals.
- Internal incubators operate under constraints startups don’t face—especially scale expectations and alignment with decades-old business lines.
- True innovation inside an enterprise requires balancing technology risk and time horizon.
- Outshift deliberately targets both near-term (6–18 month) and long-term (2–5 year) bets to maintain optionality.
- Agentic AI and quantum networking were chosen because they’re far enough from Cisco’s core to be net-new, yet close enough to leverage Cisco’s strengths.
- A $5M early win is irrelevant in a business this large, so innovation must aim for markets with the potential to meaningfully move a $60B needle.
- Internal innovators must avoid both extremes: being too futuristic (unbounded) or too incremental (not innovative).
- Sales teams in large enterprises are designed to focus intensely on core business, making them poor routes for early-stage innovation.
- Outshift maintains its own go-to-market and biz-dev teams to validate personas, test routes to market, and build repeatable sales plays before handoff.
- Internal incubation requires both external market exploration and internal business fit—product company fit matters as much as product market fit.
- A healthy innovation portfolio assumes many projects will fail; failure signals ambition, not dysfunction.
- Incubators must kill ideas quickly when thesis signals break, holding a high bar for rigor without over-optimizing for batting average.
- Cisco Research and Corporate Development act as “superpowers” by feeding Outshift insights on frontier tech and capital flows.
- Strategic levers—unfair advantages unique to Cisco—are essential for deciding which emerging tech domains to enter.
- Agentic AI’s future depends on secure, observable, cross-agent communication—an area where Cisco’s expertise is a natural fit.
- Quantum networking is a long-term foundational bet, aiming to enable scale-out for quantum compute once the domino falls.
- Cisco’s strategy relies on open ecosystems—exemplified by the Agency open-source collective designed to standardize agentic communication and quantum-era interoperability.
About the speaker
About the host
Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup-- Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles. As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.