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Sankalp Verma

Making your teams innovate better

Among a host of things that the leadership @ Intuit promotes in order to build upon this culture, is the concept of “unstructured time” (UT). What this essentially entails is that each employee is entitled to spend 10% of her time on something that she is passionate about. To encourage employees to work on their favorite ideas, we recently organized a UT jam @Intuit Small Business Group Offerings Team in Bangalore. The event spanned 30 days and culminated in each team showcasing their work in a gallery walk.

I had the challenge of coaching a young team, who had recently joined Intuit and were alien to the culture here. The approach that I adopted was very similar to how a startup would be born. Here I talk about it in detail:

Forming the team: I had a bunch of ideas which I felt would benefit the QuickBooks ecosystem and ultimately positively impact the business. My first task was to share my ideas with the team one on one and help them appreciate the same. My task was cut out since the team was fresh and so my pitch to them was as I would explain the idea to my mom (who by the way is a PhD in Psychology but knows nothing about QuickBooks or its domain). Based on the reaction of the team members to my pitch I made notes on which idea they could best contribute to. At the end of it, I had a team which shared the same passion as I had about the business idea.

Design and white boarding: Next came the step when we got on the white board and hashed out the details of the problem and how we could solve it. To keep things interesting, I proposed a technology stack which was new to the team members. This way they would learn a new technology stack at the end of the exercise. Remember-”the journey is as important as the end goal”.

Execution: Next came the all important execution phase, where most of the startups fail due to various reasons, including losing motivation, other seemingly higher priorities yada, yada, yada. As a leader, I had to ensure that the morale of the team was kept high and roadblocks were removed as they came. Few important points that help:

  • Make sure the team works on something where their development is happening. New skills will play a key role in keeping a techie motivated.
  • Break down the goal into milestones: not everyone can keep the uber goal in mind and move along just fine. Sometimes it helps if smaller targets are set and the team celebrates all of them.
  • Once you have defined the goals, let the teams fly. This doesn’t mean you don’t remain on top of things. All it means is that let the teams innovate and don’t micro-manage.
  • Save the time of the teams-startups are meant to be nimble. Don’t spend hours in meetings.
  • Identify your stakeholders/beta customers: Engage with them early in the development cycle.
  • Realize the power of prototyping: Nothing works better than building a rapid prototype and show the idea in action to relevant stakeholders. There are tons of good rapid prototyping tools out there, most are free.
  • Show the progress to stakeholders early in the cycle: You will get tons of valuable feedback from your stakeholders.
  • Adopt change: Many times you will get feedback from your stakeholders which will change the course of your cycle. Don’t hesitate in adopting change and making your team too realize why this change is needed. Remember, you are building the product for your customers, so build what they want and will use.

Polishing the end product: Before you take your product out to wider audience, please take some time out to polish the product. If you are not doing a controlled roll-out, then remember that “first impression can be the last impression”.

Elevator pitch: When our product was ready, I helped the team prepare an elevator pitch for the product. This is a very important step, since many times you won’t have more than 30 secs to sell your idea. In this time, you have to tell what is the problem you are trying to solve and what is the solution you are proposing. Keep it crisp and back it up with data. Further, good elevator pitches can be akin to drama-so don’t mind keeping it dramatic. We also had a elevator pitch contest as a part of the UT jam and the team practiced and ended up making an excellent pitch in front of our internal VC’s.

Creative slide deck: The VC’s see the same kind of slide deck day in and out. So, please keep your deck interesting. Think out of the box-make it creative. Don’t be constrained by what you have seen earlier in slides. As I mentioned-Think out of the box. Another tip is to see how you can use the first slide. Most of the decks I have seen “waste” the first slide by mentioning “just” the name of the project and team. Go figure how you can make good use of that real estate.

Taking the product to market: This is one of the most complicated stages of the product life cycle and where most ideas fail. The UT Jam produced a host of ideas-many of them in a complete state. The next challenge would be to take these to production. In a startup world, this problem would be solved differently, but the teams would face similar challenges taking their ideas to production.

Towards the end, the UT Jam gave the team a great platform to learn how to take an idea from inception to production. I believe very few organizations would provide such a great platform to its engineers. Proud to be associated with Intuit.

I am a Senior Development Manager with the SBG Offerings QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise team. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send me an email — sankalp_verma@intuit.com. The views expressed here are my own. This story was originally published here.