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?’
This article aims to start answering this question and, in the process, show how we developed a team of super engineers at Forto. I want to start by creating an image.
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.
I call this the super engineer who deeply understands the business, its domains, and its complexity. This is, in my opinion, what we have in Forto. Let me explain.
Silicon Valley product guru Marty Cagan once said that “innovation starts with engineers because they are the ones who know what is possible in technology now.” (If you don’t know who Mary Cagan is, there’s a link at the bottom to one of his presentations, which is well worth watching). This is exactly what my team, I, and the whole Forto family also believe. And to embrace this spirit of innovation, we created what we called experiment sprints.
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 Process:
In an experiment sprint, the product manager and internal stakeholders from other parts of the business, such as sales, implementation, and operations, define the issues they face with the customer who uses the Forto product, such as mapping customer ERP system data to our internal data model or identifying the performance of different suppliers within the customer supply chain team. From those issues, they create the challenges to be experimented on.
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:
- The engineers are in the driving seat for the whole experiment.
- The results of the experiments will mostly be thrown away.
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.
The Results
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.
- The engineers had so much fun working on so many different challenges and new technologies; they left their comfort zones and talked to business people and customers and did research and coding.
- Almost 50% of the team-developed experiments were approved and re-developed as part of our product solutions.
- The product features were validated before they were even implemented, and we are more confident about the future outlook of the product.
- The customers and business stakeholders were fascinated by the new solutions because they had never expected them.
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.
Reference: Marty Cagan in Mind the Product San Francisco. Link
If you want to join our super engineering team, check our careers page at Forto.
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