How Did We Make a Team of Super Engineers?

If you work in a tech company, especially a startup, you will have heard the term innovation. It’s so essential it’s quite possibly a word you hear every day. Then you probably ask the all-important question, ‘How can we promote innovation in the team?’

Imagine having a team of engineers who fully understand the company’s business, the very reason why it exists; who knows what the customers’ pain points are, and can improve the product not only by, for example, finishing tickets on Jira but also by being the driving force behind innovation in the whole company.

Experiment sprints allow our engineers to fulfill their passion, unleash their talents, push their expertise, and test their imaginations by trying new technologies and learning from them. Those sprints allow the business to think more innovatively and open up to new opportunities that might otherwise have been missed.

The job of the rest of the team is to find solutions to those challenges. Those solutions have no limitations; they can use any technology, programming language, crazy UI, etc.

So far, so simple.

That simple idea and simple sprint had huge implications. It gave us a new way of seeing our product challenges and created a list of unique, creative, and innovative solutions. For example, we made a brand new scripting language for our internal use! Why, you might ask? My answer is, why not? Because in the process of doing this, we learned a lot. This simple idea also brought the engineers to a higher understanding of the business, its challenges, and potential.

For example, to develop an automatic and customizable out-of-the-box solution to map the customer ERP system data, they had to investigate and talk to customers and check their data models. They asked about the change frequency and analyzed the customer’s real mapping problems. To create KPI dashboards for evaluating the supplier performance, they deeply defined and investigated the supplier tasks, or what is called jobs-to-done, to catch exceptions and patterns.

It’s not just coding; it is problem-solving and innovation and if you get the chance to lead a team like that, consider yourself lucky.

The rules for these experiment sprints are brief and straightforward:

This is probably not what you were expecting. The point is that the solutions aren’t the crucial part of the experiments. The learnings and findings from those experiments are what we were looking for. Those learnings are the source of knowledge that won’t just help the product grow for the next quarter — they will shape a new view of the product and open new opportunities that were missed before.

Does this sound interesting to you? Is this the kind of team environment you’d like to be part of? Maybe you may become even more interested in sharing some results from running these experiment sprints with my team for almost a year now.

So, now let’s imagine we didn’t run these experiment sprints.

We would be losing those new and innovative solutions, the vast value we brought to the customers, and I would never have had the chance to meet my team of Super Engineers.

And If you like this article, invite me to a coffee by giving me some claps here or maybe a share or follow :) no obligation

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