Every organization values innovation, but can they commit to it?
Even with commitment, can you make it work?
If you’re looking for a way to turbocharge development and fan the flames of innovation at your company, here’s something we tried at Neustar Webmetrics that was really successful.
But first, a little bit about the Webmetrics team.
Performance DNA
Webmetrics products are tightly focused on helping our customers achieve the best performance possible. We know that web pages can always load faster, networks can always be more reliable, and systems can be made available to even more users. Unlocking this potential is our passion. It’s in our genes!
While there is a wide assortment of tools out there, we want to offer more. We want to make ours better. Because there are innovative new ways of understanding web performance that we haven’t discovered yet, our work is never complete.
So we turned our gaze inward. How can we invent new ways of monitoring, testing, and analyzing our customers’ websites? How can we improve our own internal operations? Can we wring even more excellent work from a world-class product development team?
We found a way. Because each Neustar developer, engineer, and administrator working on the Webmetrics suite of products already had the “performance gene” in them, they already had the next great idea in them, too.
So we gave them a day to show us!
NeuDev
Last month, Webmetrics Engineering held an event called NeuDev in which anyone with a great idea was given the chance to build it and show it off. The only rules: It had to relate to our products somehow, and it had to have a chance of being ready in a day. Facebook, Atlassian, and Yahoo have held similar “hack days,” and the institutional “20% time” that Google gives its engineers is well-known for bringing successful products like Gmail into the world.
Furthermore, it was clear that this was just the thing to energize an already high-performance team. Fans of Daniel Pink’s book Drive ( watch the fantastic overview video here) have learned that creative motivation comes from within-working on projects that are meaningful to the worker-and goes much further than external rewards. This was clearly evident as soon as the first team presented their work! In one eight-hour day of focused attention on something that was significant to the creator, the team built a bounty of cool skunkworks projects, product improvements, and next-gen stuff that we can’t even tell you about.
It was amazing!
But not really. It merely confirmed our assumptions.
We awarded an oversized Stanley Cup-scale perpetual trophy to the best project of the day, and we got each department involved, giving out special prizes in the judges’ area of expertise:
- Most Useful to Customers (Product Management)
- Best Pitch (Sales & Marketing)
- Coolest Hack (Engineering)
- Most Innovative (Research & Development)
- Most Useful Internally (Operations & QA)
- and a few more.
The Results
Some teams scratched an itch, fixing broken systems or building better ways of managing them. A couple of projects hadn’t even occurred to our sharp Product team-and they were ready to ship that day!
Each participant was keenly reminded that the company is invested in their creativity, and the organizers were reminded that sometimes the best ideas are grown from the ground up.
We can’t wait to do it again. We might just do it every month.
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