Unlocking Innovation with Unstructured Time
Here at Clover, I recognize that there’s always more work to be completed than time or resources available. Everyone is contributing to critical work in the roadmap, and there’s no time to be sitting around twiddling your thumbs. Well, maybe fidget spinners are allowed.
As my wise mother used to tell me, “Learning is like journeying in a canoe going upstream. If you’re not constantly paddling, you’ll always be behind.” We should strive to have learning be a constant. If our employees are shuttled from one project to the next with only scant time to react, a few things will happen:
- Our technology stack becomes outdated, leaving us more vulnerable to unreliability and external attack.
- Now that we are constantly firefighting, we lose market share to our competitors due to feature stagnation.
- Company morale is shattered and we fail to retain our top talent.
When I joined Clover, our Clover Go mobile teams didn’t have “unstructured time” allocated in our agile development process. The whole organization was heads down on execution and fighting against crunch timelines. There was no time to work on small optimizations in the product or invest in the engineers’ skillset, but now we have it as a regular sprint baked into our roadmap. I’d like to share with you some of the “what, how, and impact” of implementing unstructured time within my organization.
WHAT
Unstructured Time, or whitespace time, is time dedicated for employees to think strategically of ways to improve one of the three things: product, process, or people. It’s a time used to add “delighters” into the product or address technical debt that we did not get to during the project’s release.
For process, it can be a time to optimize an op-mech of getting the product translations between engineering and linguistic teams. It can be a time for an employee to learn about a new technology or programming language or to create a proof of concept to improve his or her skills. This is applicable for every role on the team. For example, a developer or quality engineer can spend the time cleaning up dead code, refactoring, or learning a new framework. For someone in management, the time may be spent learning the product more deeply, fixing bugs in the code to stay more technical, or reading about the industry’s latest tech.
HOW
Similarly to how tech debt is created as an epic or a story in your release and sprint respectively, you can create an entire sprint dedicated to Unstructured Time. You can work with your Product Manager to figure out the start and end date of each release, and then incorporate the Unstructured Time in the timeline.
For example, if your release 1.0 is targeted for March 31, 2019, you can have a week-long Unstructured Time sprint from April 1st to April 7th, 2019. Your next release start date can be April 8th, 2019. Using a tracking tool like Jira, you can work with your engineers to formulate on whitespace topics, and then create stories accordingly. Talk to your engineers to determine what success should look like. Since it’s a sprint, you can always have demos, retrospectives, and daily scrum to share progress.
IMPACT
Based on my previous experiences elsewhere, along with those here at Clover, I continue to see the huge impact of Unstructured Time. Product managers appreciate the innovation and excitement that Unstructured Time brings to the product. We have incorporated many features incubated during Unstructured Time into our Clover Go product: discovering a new OCR library that scans cards as an alternate payment method, adding TouchID and FaceID to expedite login, adding many new animations to increase usability and modernize our app, and more. We have also used Unstructured Time to clean up and refactor areas of the code, add more unit tests, and create an automation framework for UI testing. The fact is that the more people who spend time innovating the product, the better for the customers, who are then more likely to recommend your product.
As an engineering leader, I love seeing how excited my teams are during these sprints. It breaks the mundane development cycle and energizes team members. Plus, they feel rewarded with the personal satisfaction of thinking up interesting, meaningful solutions, and then seeing them come to fruition in production. My team comes back from innovation week with more focus and knowledge to continue delivering awesome products. Unquestionably, the investment I made in them shows my appreciation and recognition for their continued excellence.
It’s important to remember that with every planned activity in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), you need to be flexible and adapt to business requirements. There will always be times when a specific team member is needed because of an immediate hotfix or to be on-call for a production issue. As engineering leaders, we need to work with our team members to allocate a different week for them to work on their whitespace projects. Staying nimble to the business’s needs while being supportive to your staff is the key to having successful outcomes and building a highly engaged team.
