How the magic happens: fostering innovation in dev teams
One of my favourite things about being a leader at Xero is empowering my team to do the best work of their lives. Here’s what I’ve learned about enabling development teams to love what they do, while inspiring them to innovate and not only think outside the box, but remove the box completely.
Provide the problem, not the solution
One thing many of us in tech have in common is we love solving problems. It’s not only challenging, but gives us a real sense of satisfaction and purpose when we find the answer. Rather than dictating specific initiatives I want my team to take, I find they’re happier, more motivated and innovative when we present them with a customer problem the business is trying to solve. We then give them the space to come up with their own solution.
By giving our teams this creative freedom, we’ve seen some pretty amazing things happen. But there is a crucial element that needs to be in place to empower teams to make the right decisions and spend their time effectively. And that’s having a clear understanding of the company and team’s overall vision, and crucially how their work contributes to it.
When we set performance goals, which we refer to as OKRs (objectives and key results) we make the end goal clear, rather than spelling out the tasks our team members need to complete to get there. We present our product strategy and vision at annual and quarterly planning sessions, which sets the scene.
We then hand over to our product managers to walk through the customer problems we want to solve with our development teams. They work together to decide what initiatives they will work on or experiment with to influence the metrics set out in their OKRs, which level up to our strategic goals.
Give teams a chance to get beyond their day-to-day
You may have heard of Google’s policy that encourages employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects. It’s how some of the company’s most successful products were created, including gmail. Many other tech leaders have followed suit.
I think the most important thing about these kinds of initiatives is that it gives teams a chance to get outside their day-to-day, giving them headspace, freedom to innovate and importantly time.
My team dedicates one day a month to research and development, but they have the flexibility to choose when they use this day. This approach has really impacted how the team works — we even started using a whole new API framework, which a team member learnt about on research and development day.
We also provide all kinds of other opportunities for our teams to get out of the office and work with new people. Whether it’s something small, like having a walking meeting, or on a larger scale, like participating in our quarterly hackathons. In these, we encourage participants to be as innovative as they can be and work with teammates they wouldn’t usually get an opportunity to work with.
Together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts
This leads into the final piece in the puzzle — collaboration. When different ideas, points of view and experiences come together, innovations are created that no one individual could have come up with on their own. Diversity is a crucial element in this, whether that’s in gender, nationality, background, programming language, experience, or age.
Together, teams can come up with crazy, creative, ideas that no one person could have reached by themselves. They turn those into robust concepts that solve problems and create real business solutions. In our team, we strive to have the most diverse team possible. We speak over 10 languages, have a range of ages, religions, experience and gender — as well as lots of kids and dogs at home as well.
At Xero, we also use forums like communities of practice and Lean Coffees to unite our team members — giving them the opportunity to learn from each other and strive to keep improving. We’ve also recently started a ‘product corner’ where the product management team gets together to share learnings, what’s on our roadmaps and invite in guest speakers. It’s a great way for people to get on the same page and learn from each other in a safe environment.
When all of these above aspects are brought together, that’s when the magic happens. I’d love you to leave a comment and let me know what you’re doing to encourage innovation and how you’re helping teams do the best work of their lives.
