Let’s get Creative?
Looking back at more than a year of experimentation at Akeneo
TL;DR:
- 1.5 years ago, Akeneo development teams started to dedicate time to learn and explore technologies and ideas, individually or in groups.
- We spend this dedicated learning time watching talks, doing pet projects, and experimenting with new architectures together, all the while having fun
- This new habit allows us to uncover novel ideas and new ways of doing.
Why is that important?
Innovation is one of Akeneo’s key company values. While it’s hard for companies to agree on a set of values that truly reflect their culture, I believe it’s even harder for people to actually live up to them in their daily work. Yet, we want everyone, not only to know and understand the values but also to experience them and make them their own.
Amid approaching deadlines and unforeseen difficulties, innovation is a topic that can easily fall off the radar. Yet, in our industry, we observe many successful companies that make creativity and innovation a priority.
Google’s 20% percent time rule is a well-known example from which unexpected yet successful products were born. Gmail, Google Maps, AdSense all originated from this program.
💡 The big question is: what are the steps you can take to unlock creativity in your own work environment?
In this article, I’ll lay out for you a simple guide you can follow to foster a safe, creative, and highly collaborative space, for you and your team to have fun while exploring and learning new stuff.
Meet: The squad university
The squad university is a weekly 1-hour dedicated for the team to have fun experimenting and learning (together)!
During a session, anyone is free to do whatever they believe can help them perform their job better. Things like watching a conference talk, listening to a podcast, reading a book, trying out a new programming language are all very good options for a session.
The nature of the content researched, studied, or played with can be or not be related to Akeneo’s activities at all. The only goal here is learning, individually or in small groups.
We encourage people to participate and offer their ideas, and we believe this is more likely to happen in an open and engaging space. On the other hand, if the environment feels too constrictive or too judgy, it’s going to be hard to brainstorm and build a good momentum in the group.
Experiments overview
This is how Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, explained the “20% time rule” in this interview:
The rule says that you can do anything you want to with your 20% time, these people are computer scientists and engineers, they are not going to veer too far away from their core business.
Looking back on more than a year of weekly sessions, I must say we are no exception to this rule. Let's have a look at the journey so far.
Watching talks together
We started out by watching recorded conference talks (remotely) together on topics of interest such as Domain Driven Design (Look for NDC conferences or influential personalities in the industry), React development practices (talks like this one on “Compound Components” by Ryan Florence) or on React libraries like “React Admin Crash course”).
Soon enough, people started to play with the ideas seen in the talks and started to experiment with small examples.
Online courses
We also took some time to study online courses. We found this thorough course on front-end testing made by Kent C. Dodds and decided to go through most of the content on our own.
Some other teams decided to use the Datadog learning center to get a better understanding of Datadog’s capabilities and how they could benefit from them.
Experiments & pet projects!
I think experiments are definitely my team’s favorite activity. You think of something that can be improved, made different, or fun to do, and you just do it. No barriers, no commitments, you try it out, just for the sake of it, and see how it turns out!
By following this philosophy, we went from experimenting with architectural approaches like “Micro frontends” in our codebase (that 6 months down the line is now a known practice in our project) to hijacking some features we just developed to try out new usage.
Currently, we are working on a pet project called “Vite-Mon-Palet” which is a web app we want to use internally to manage our own Palet games tournaments. It’s an excuse to:
- experiment with the Next.js technology and Vercel
- use our very own design system library outside of Akeneo products and see how it behaves.
As explained previously, it’s really important to understand that there’s no commitment we’ll see an experiment to its end. Because as soon as a team is not learning or having fun anymore, or just changes its mind and decides to explore a whole new topic, that’s it, the experiment is paused or discarded, and that’s okay. It means the experiment served its purpose — things were learned, fun was had — and the team simply decided it was time to move on.
Surf the creativity wave 🏄🏼♀️
The most important thing is to keep the ball rolling! The team needs to create the habit of dedicating the time to do the sessions.
The second most important thing is to be clear on the real outcomes of these sessions: learnings, personal growth, and fun.
At odd with their regular day-to-day work, we’re asking the teammates to focus not on a tangible output (e.g. a functioning app), but on the intangibles: joy of learning, personal and professional development, and teamwork.
In their daily work, it’s easy for software teams to confine themselves within the boundaries of what is already known, and what is already used. We found that the squad universities provide the help Akeneo needs to continuously improve and envision its future while giving teammates the opportunity to bond and grow together.
Thanks for reading this article and I want to thank Xavier Briand for the interesting discussions and insightful reviews!
If you want to explore more on this topic, have a look at those two books:
- Creative confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
What are your favorite resources on Creativity? Let us know in the comments!
