Lift-Off — Accelerating Innovation

Introduction

Innovation is like a space mission. There are challenges to overcome at every step of the way and even when the work is seemingly done, it still needs to launch successfully.

In this post, I’ll share some of my learnings around how to successfully navigate the transition from well-established systems to innovative new systems in a mature engineering organization. I’ll share a number of frameworks and methods for building and maintaining trust during periods of innovation, as well as deciding on the right level of innovation in order to achieve lift-off.

It starts with an objective; what are you trying to achieve and why? The “why” depends on internal (e.g., technology solutions) and external factors (e.g., evolving customer needs) that make up the environment. The lens through which the business views opportunities and challenges is influenced by the environment. For example, if the business is rapidly growing, there will be a higher tolerance for tech debt because tech debt is perceived as having a lower interest rate during rapid periods of growth. Conversely, if the business is optimizing for cost, it will focus on standardization and tech debt will be perceived has having a high interest rate. These factors will influence the “why”, “how”, and “what” of innovation.

Why

Innovation oscillates along a business’s growth vector and occurs during innovation windows. Change is a catalyst for innovation windows. Change can originate from within or outside a business and it can be real or anticipated.

Two tools are useful to help visualize innovation along a business’s growth vector: 1) S-curves and 2) innovation windows.

Growth and innovation are dependent upon one another. No innovation leads to stagnation, too much innovation is expensive and disruptive.

Take the Hubble telescope for example. It was capable of taking amazing pictures of the universe and pushed our knowledge of space to new limits. Over time however, each additional photo provides diminishing returns when it comes to advancing astronomy. This paved the way for the Webb telescope, which is stretching the limits of our understanding of the universe even further.

Innovation works the same way. Existing technologies and processes deliver diminishing returns over time. At some point, innovation will be required to unlock the next growth curve.

Who

Before moving on with the “how”, let’s talk about the “who”. Typically, a mature business has two engines: a performance engine and an innovation engine. The performance engine uses well-established solutions and practices to execute on near-term objectives. Conversely, the innovation engine is focused on long term value creation through novel solutions and processes. The innovation engine starts at the beginning of an innovation window. The result at the end of the innovation window should be paradigm shifts that unlock the next phase of growth. Paradigm shifts are disruptive to the performance engine and are catalysts for change.

In a mature engineering organization, stream-aligned teams (henceforth referred to as product teams) often act as the performance engine, while local platform teams act as the innovation engine. It’s indeed possible for the product teams to play both roles, but it comes at a cost. Often the result is a “stop the world” event where product work is paused while the team innovates and migrates. There are challenges with having separate teams play the two roles as well. Specifically, members of product teams become the customers of the platform team, which inherently introduces added complexity in terms of communication and collaboration. Regardless of which approach is taken, it’s critical to understand the “who”. For example, who’s the customer and who will be impacted by the paradigm shifts. Understanding the “who” will help you understand how to approach innovation effectively and achieve lift off.

How & What

How you approach innovation is critically important. Innovation is triggered by change or the anticipation of change, but innovation itself is also a change catalyst. New technologies or approaches will create ripple effects throughout an organization and the closer people are to the nucleus of innovation, the stronger the magnitude of the ripples. Product team members will often be closest to the nucleus and each person will be on their own change curve as they absorb the ripples.

Platform teams are responsible for managing expectations for innovation and ensuring customers (i.e,. product teams) can absorb the ripples effectively. As knowledge workers, a strong emphasis is placed on decision making, creativity, ability to solve complex problems, and continuous learning. So, unless your product teams are comprised of automatons, platform teams will need to be proactively and constantly engaging with product team members and cross-functional partners, including them in the innovation process.

Specifically, this means product team members and cross-functional partners will need to be involved in all phases of the innovation lifecycle, especially early on when critical decisions are being made. Let’s take a look at the phases of innovation and some tools and techniques to leverage for each phase. The framework I will leverage for the innovation lifecycle is: Explore, Expand, Exploit.

1 — Explore

Exploration is a critical phase of innovation where the seeds of trust must be planted. There are two sub-phases of the exploration phase: problem space exploration and solution space exploration.

Problem space exploration

The goal of this phase is to align on a problem statement with a cross functional group of stakeholders, consisting of participants that will be in any orbit capable of feeling the impact of the innovation ripple effects. It’s critical to include influencers in this phase, you’ll want them on your side early. Including them later will erode trust and will require revisiting many decisions, significantly stalling or even preventing lift-off. This is the best opportunity to listen and collect a broad set of challenges and pain points from a diverse set of stakeholders.

Solution space exploration

The goal of this phase is to align on how to solve the problem identified in the problem space. Force the group to consider a number of different solutions (3 is a good goal). Then consider the pros and cons of each solution before deciding on the final approach. The solution should capture the high level paradigm shifts that will enable the next phase of growth for the business.

To achieve escape velocity, the solution should significantly move the needle. Kunal Shah uses the Delta 4 Framework to evaluate startups. This same framework can be used to evaluate innovation. For example, will the new solution bring a 4x improvement to customers? If you aim too high, costs will be exorbitant. If you aim too low, product engineers won’t adopt the new solution and it will cease to deliver the desired impact. In both cases, there will be a failure to launch.

Another mental model to consider is the Overton Window, which captures the notion that ideas must fall somewhere on the spectrum in terms of what’s culturally acceptable for an organization. You must exercise judgment to ensure innovations aren’t “dead on arrival” due to non-technical reasons.

Once you’ve aligned on the right solution, it’s time to shift gears to the implementation/expand phase.

2 — Expand

The expand phase is where most of the implementation happens. Many critical decisions will be made in this phase, a number of which will be one-way decisions that are very expensive or impossible to reverse. As a result, communication is critical during the expand phase.

Similar to the idea of innovation ripples, people in different orbits will have different levels of understanding. For example, individuals working closely with the innovative solution will be highly informed, while individuals in further orbits will have only a cursory understanding. Create a communication strategy and share it. Communicate early and often. Communicate that consensus is a great way to build a mediocre product and as a result, sometimes the team will make decisions internally and signal intent. Other times the team will actively seek feedback.

This is the phase of ambiguity. Set directional milestones and refrain from overly prescriptive planning. Not only will plans be inaccurate early on, but they can place arbitrary constraints around a team’s capabilities and stifle creativity.

3 — Exploit

This is the lift-off phase. Congratulations, now the real learning begins. You’ll know you’re close to achieving lift-off if the gravitational pull from the innovation starts increasing as a result of increased mass due to network effects. In other words, customers are excited to use the new technology, resulting in network effects and rapid adoption of the new technology.

Conclusion

Innovation is challenging. In many ways, the technical aspects of innovation are the easy part. Successful innovation is about working together as a team. Creating and maintaining alignment, trust, and understanding requires constant energy. Including people early in the process is challenging and will feel inefficient, but will pay dividends later in the project. Stay humble, curious, and patient, everyone is on a different change curve. Most importantly, stay courageous, maintain strong conviction in the path, and enjoy the ride.

“To infinity, and beyond” — Buzz Lightyear