The highs & lows of running an internal incubator.

The highs & lows of running an internal incubator.

We’re on a journey. And I thought it would be interesting to chart our progress, our learnings, our failings along the way. I guess it’s just like keeping a diary; but for business.

Myself and four engineers. Tasked with the mission to create and test a new product; within an 34 year old company whose CEO has a passion and appetite to innovate. No mean feat. Especially when 90% of incubators fail.

I’m envisaging this series to be a cathartic outlet at the end of each week, but I’d be happy for anyone to come along for the ride.

Anna

Getting ready.

It’s been just over a week since our CEO, CTO, COO and I got together for an afternoon; gathered around a whiteboard, cake and tea at the ready. Armed with loose outlines for the product, measures of success, tech architecture and team — I set about working with colleagues on a comms plan, a briefing doc, having 1-2-1 conversations with those directly impacted, holding a kick-off session with the new team (more cake!), collaborating on a Board paper and finding us a home.

It’s been quite a week — but the excitement is palpable, and to my relief the rest of the business seems just as excited. The latter is pretty important — a few years ago we attempted something similar and, probably because we communicated less, there was some resentment and bad feeling around the creation of a ‘special ops’ team — it had felt awkward. Something I was keen to avoid this time around.

On a personal level, I have gone through the usual emotions of excitement coupled with apprehension — can I do this? what if it doesn’t work? what about my ‘normal’ day job?

So, with the team in place and a temporary home, we embark on this new adventure — sprint planning tomorrow. For now though, it’s time for bed.

Week 1.

And what a week it’s been — the initial daunting first morning — where do we start? To the highs of first tangible outputs and lows of realising the architecture could be pretty complex.

Day 1 — was all about the product, the user problems, we did a lot of talking, white-boarding and managed to set a first sprint. Don’t think we touched our laptops bar an hour at the end of the day to set our sprint. A non-coding day, and it felt liberating.

Day 2 — we divided and conquered; API schema and post-it prototype for our product UI.

Day 3 — a continuation of Day 2’s activities and a deep-dive into app store reviews of where other products were letting down the users. A real high by the end of day 3 with a prototype reading from our mocked API.

Day 4 — for me it was the low-point of the week; not helped by feeling poorly (think the adrenalin of the past few weeks had worn off and the immunity system took a hit). We hit a conundrum with the architecture and got concerned over assumptions that maybe had gotten misunderstood. We were also finding some of the tools we were using were laggy and slow to build up, but that said had gotten us so far.

Day 5 — unblocked on our tech assumptions from the previous day, we found renewed energy to wrap up loose ends putting us in a good state for first demo (Monday), and clear over the aims of week 2’s coming sprint.

All in all, not a bad week at all, spirits and motivations good — and rapid prototyping tools have enabled us to move fast — scaphold.io and create react app to name but two. Paper however was probably the most potent form of learning for us this week; with the Hooked and Kano models being good frameworks to focus the product thinking.

Here’s to Week 2. Happy Weekend!

Anna Divers
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25 min
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