Hacking your way into the future
Letting employees do whatever they want can create entirely new business opportunities — here’s how to avoid the pitfalls
It all sounds so simple: Be innovative and start doing the next big thing. But doing something new is often killed by the current business — before it even starts. In this article, we will look at how attempts to hack into the future can both fail and succeed.
The wild west of development opportunities
It is easy to understand why some industries become obsolete. For example, going from physical to digital photography made Kodak’s film market disappear. Kodak had the skills, resources, and network to conquer this market — but they didn’t. Nothing new in this, but the challenge remains the same for many large organizations in changing markets. How do you create the new while still running your current business?
One way is to look to the employees for solutions. When people are recruited for a company, you often hear about the 20% rule, where people are allowed to use 20% of their time on whatever they like in order to come up with something new. Often however, the 20% isn’t as free as initially anticipated: you have to apply for the projects you would like to do in this time, and the projects have to be approved.
At Citrix, we do not have a 20% rule. Instead, we have Hack Week: Once a year, we create the wild west for five days. There are basically no rules for what you do during Hack Week. Leadership gives some ideas for direction, but for the most part people just do whatever they find interesting. The only requirement is that you present what you have done on the last day.
All kinds of office norms disappear: there are meetings, computers and people everywhere. Weird computer chips are set up in all rooms, toy cars drive around the office, groups compete for talent with breakfast and snack bounties — everybody is working hard on an idea they’re passionate about. Not far from the Mutiny environment in Halt and Catch Fire.
Like Mutiny, this chaos actually creates a lot of ideas, which are developed into something demo-able.
Friday is the demo day for Hack Week. It is a bit overwhelming to see 50 different hacks being presented in four hours, but the presentations and hacks keep interest with their creativity.
Everything from large business concepts to actual code are shown during the presentations. The presentations range from how to use tools in developing products, to add-ons to current products, to new standalone, BIG ideas. The big ideas might be something entirely different from Citrix’s current interests.
Hack Week hangover
The questions that is far too often not asked is: What happens after Hack Week? What happens when everyone goes back to their daily work?
Hacks on current products: Improvements to current products are the easy part. If a project from Hack Week fits into a current product, often the new feature finds its way into the product naturally. The idea lives happily ever after.
Totally out-there ideas: Ideas where the employees have absolutely no knowledge about the business are almost always discarded if they do not show a gigantic potential. When someone suggest to make toys or washing machines, this is probably better suited to a startup or company with industry experience.
New standalone ideas: The most interesting and challenging ideas are the brand-new ideas where the company has some knowledge about the industry and can envision a path for the product to succeed. This is also where most companies fail. Let’s explore why these ideas die so often:
How to kill ideas
When you have an idea for a new standalone product, coming from an event like Hack Week, companies are often accidental-experts at killing the ideas. Here are the main causes:
Starved to death
The problem is when you return to your normal work after Hack Week, you’ve got a mountain of daily tasks to get back to. The project creators are typically busy and stressed. If their idea is just a little uncertain, they will not have much time to develop the idea unless a top manager (or product owner) finds it interesting. The idea starves to death, as people are no longer working on it.
Processed to death
Some organizations set up a stage gate model in order to only let the best ideas proceed. The problem with this is that stage gate models are in nature about killing “bad” ideas, because it is very difficult to assess ideas at this early stage. And it becomes even worse when companies add this dangerous ingredient to the mix: middle-managers with no budget for innovation. These managers will sit in an innovation board because they have to, and their personal purpose is to look good in eyes of other managers. Admitting that you do not really know much about a product idea or suggested industry will basically never happen. It is much better to talk from your gut feeling about everything that is wrong. And this becomes a very effective way of killing ideas.
Penny-pinched to death
Creating something new takes time, manpower, and therefore, money. If it is possible to get any budget for new things, you have to go through a long process of applying for funds. The problem is that you often have to show a good version of a product or idea, and that takes time to create. Time you have not received funding for yet. And while you are working without funding, you are probably not moving fast enough, you’re losing interest from stakeholders, and every day that goes by is a day someone else outside the company could go to market first.
What works for us
Taking these ways of killing ideas and hacks into account, we must admit that we have accidentally both starved ideas to death and killed ideas with no budget. However, at Citrix we are making progress toward giving ideas more of a chance to grow and thrive. By systematically going through the ideas from Hack Week and encouraging some of the promising teams to keep working on their ideas, we have supported good hacks and allowed them to survive. It has been difficult, and we are still struggling. But some of the ideas are beginning to show up on the radar, mentioned by top mangers as big opportunities. Slowly the organizational wheels are starting to roll, and we have two opportunities from Hack Week for which we are applying for internal funding. Not peanuts — we are applying for millions.
So here is what we have learned, if you want to succeed as an organization in making a Hack Week project survive:
- Communicate that Hack Week is longer than a week: If stakeholders think that Hack Week is over after a week, they’ll miss out on big opportunities. It is important to communicate that Hack Week can produce long term products, and that that’s the exact purpose of it.
- Convince, convince, convince: When you’re done, you have to convince people that it is a good idea. Sell it! You often need the communication skills of a designer or product manager to put in the right appearence or language in order to really convince upwards in the organization.
- Make someone responsible for innovation: You need a person with innovation as his or her responsibility to keep pushing the ideas of an event like this. If you do not have someone that fights to support innovation, ideas will starve to death. It will happen quickly, without you realizing.
- Carry on with a skunkworks project: Initially you may have to work under the radar. In order to ever obtain funding, a prototype needs to be in a shape that stakeholders can see true value in. Hack Week projects built in a week usually aren’t refined enough to show off and get funding. So initially, try working in secret — for the sake of your idea!
These are some of our experiences on what works if you want to be innovative and move a large company into new business areas. We give 100% during Hack Week and keep our hacks alive afterwards, so we can get them to a state where we can have customers saying go or no-go. Instead of getting stuck in internal evaluations, we would much rather have the market decide whether our ideas deserve a shot.
