Presenter: Jesse Knight, FRC 8592

Follow Newton’s journey through the proposal of, planning for, and execution of “Pods” as a way to organize students and new mentors on our FRC team. Pods are small cross-functional teams with a specific goal or feature in mind – something that is perfect for some tech companies. In FRC, they contain every specialty skill needed to make one mechanism of the robot work.

This structure was very successful on 8592 in 2024. For example, students were able to have end to end ownership over a robot function, and new mentors could help with one part of the robot without being overwhelmed by all parts of the robot. Yet we had our own learning curve with this structure, and had to adapt some of our original plans to what we encountered.

About Jesse

I work in a ‘pod’ structure for Oscar Health Insurance, managing several teams who work to automate certain back-end functions about our health insurance operations. I was inspired to bring this structure to 8592 after hearing pieces of it while talking to teams during the 2023 Mentor Conference about how they manage themselves during the FRC season. I’ve coached 3 different FRC teams over 20 years now. For 17 of those years, I’ve been the driver coach behind the glass. I’ve held every adult role except “team lead”, learning specialties necessary for the team at the time (e.g. CAD). I love FRC strategy at the highest levels, but ultimately work hardest to help my team find the right level of success for us with the students / resources we have.