Why We Innovation Sprint

Post-it notes; Gmail; Facebook’s “Like” button. What do these famous products have in common? They are all examples of when time spent outside the normal day to day project work led to new opportunities. Some companies call it “20% time”, some call it “dabbling”, some “hacking”. Whatever you want to call it, there is a certain serendipity that can happen when you have a culture that promotes innovation and gives engineers time and license to think and work outside the box.

At Social Tables, we call this our “Innovation Sprint”. The name comes from the now classic term from the Agile software methodology “Sprint”, which is a fixed amount of time (usually one or two weeks) in which work is accomplished, presented, and evaluated. What makes our Innovation Sprint different is that there are no product requirements or fixed goals. It’s a time to explore new ideas, try out new tech, and build new things. There’s no pressure of set deliverables or requirements, so we can feel free to “shoot for the moon”. Failure is always an option as long as we learn something and share the knowledge. The only two requirements for projects are: 1) there must be a (loosely) justifiable use to the business, and 2) project work and/or findings must be presented at the end.

This past August 2016 was our first two week experiment with this concept, and it turned out to be a big success. Here are some of the things we accomplished:

• Created community benchmark tools for WebGL
• Explored GraphQL and React native for creating mobile displays of our data
• Figured out how to efficiently create 2D floor plans with 3D scanning technology
• Created user metrics to track how efficient our users are in each version of our apps
• Used bluetooth beacons to register peoples presence at events and created a location-aware app to show venue information
• Tracked head positions in 3D space with a webcam and machine learning algorithms

Projects were demoed at the end with judging by our senior staff, fun prizes were awarded, and the rest of the company got to sit in the audience and be impressed by what we accomplished.

So, what’s our takeaway? What do we have to show for our time? We haven’t made the next Gmail yet, but it’s been great to see how some of the ideas that came out of the Sprint have started sneaking into our product roadmap, and how our engineers are putting the tech and techniques they learned to good use in their day to day work. Here are a few examples of the outcomes:

• GraphQL has made a welcome appearance in our production products and is helping us tie our internal apis together in a clean way.
• A visual debugger created for visualizing the process of creating floor plan data from a point cloud has been reused several times in new projects regarding floor plan data.
• A couple of cross-platform native mobile apps were built using React Native. While we don’t have any plans to go to production with these, we proved we could ramp up quickly on mobile apps with the technology.
• We first used the apex tool to manage our deployment of lambda functions on AWS, which has sense become a standard for us.
• We gained knowledge in some new areas like machine learning, which is becoming a new focus for many tech companies and could be important for our strategy in the future.

All in all, the event was a success, and in 2017, we’re doing it again, and it’s going to be great.