Jobster has a “20% for innovation program” for our developer team, loosely modeled on Google’s 20% program. We consider the program a success because it has resulted in several interesting features that will graduate into the core product and that are important to our business (for example, relationship based job feeds, Jobster groups, and Jobster rank for prospects.)
In this post (part of a “continuing series on innovation”:/blog/category/innovation) I’d like to share some of the features that we’ve identified as important for a successful innovation program.
Doing repeatable innovation is hard. A number of ingredients have to come together: the right people, the right investment and buy in, the right relationships and rituals for collaborating on innovation, and the right process for translating innovation into product.
First, a successful innovation program requires the right people on the boat… the sort of developer who will get bored and quit the company if not given the chance to innovate, who can combine technical creativity with an understanding of the overall business to come up with something unique. A past post on “hiring innovators”:http://thebogles.com/blog/2005/09/hiring-innovators/ talks about ways to help identify these people.
Second, 20% for innovation requires that upper management truly buys into the concept and all of its ramifications.
- Innovation isn’t free: 20% for innovation means investing 20% of your development resources towards that goal, and accounting for that investment in the schedule and the engineering budget. I consider it a great credit to our CEO Jason Goldberg that he fully bought into the concept and the investment that entails.
- Along with investment of resources, innovation requires a considerable amount of trust. It’s easy to desire an innovation program, but then want to add on twelve layers of approval to make sure that the innovation is relevant and likely to succeed. That defeats the purpose of the program, which is to enable smart people to go a bit out on a limb without spending all of their energy achieving consensus first.
- Reserving 20% for innovation requires accurate scheduling. If you attempt to reserve 20% for innovation but underestimate the time required for your release by 50%, not a whole lot of innovation is going to happen. Jobster is blessed to have a Alan Steele as our VP of Engineering; he has an uncanny ability to derive accurate schedule estimates and ship on time.
Third, innovation requires the right processes and rituals to increase the likelihood that the innovation is relevant and finds its ways into the product. The great thing about innovation is that it can lead to collaboration between different parts of the organization that otherwise interact too rarely.
A key Jobster ritual is the innovation bash. It’s an informal, social affair rather than death by Powerpoint. There are snacks and drinks; a gathering of folks from across the company wanders casually from desk to desk, and developers show off their projects followed by discussion. The gathering considers how the features can be used and how they can be improved to solve problems in the business. The net effect is a sharing of ideas and needs, and a cementing of ties and relationships across the company.
Finally, the right innovations need to find their way into the product. I think Google has the right idea with their Google Labs, and we’re emulating this feature in a Jobster labs, which will be unveiled shortly in our 2.0 release. Labs are important because many ideas will fail or at least not be ready for primetime in their initial conception. You need to carve off a space in your application or service were it’s OK to take risks and fail, and where the testing requirements are reduced. A failure in the labs must not cause scale or security problems in the core product, or serious harm to the consumer. Customers must be given realistic expections in the terms of service (and in line or two of text they actually read!) about the things that might go wrong.
Though it isn’t free, a good innovation program pays off greatly in the medium to long run. It delivers features that would never happen otherwise, or that would cost much more under a standard process. Equally important, it helps attract and retain the best people.
