Innovating as an Engineering Leader
Tricks and tips for cultivating a climate where innovation can thrive
This is the final post in the series on Innovation at a typical workplace. We started our journey by defining innovation in Engineering, wrapping our head around the concept by looking at an innovative chef, coming to accept that innovation is typically trapped within space and time constraints in a typical organization, and began exploring how an individual contributor could break free of these constraints. This final post aims to explore how an engineering leader could help their team do the same.
Armed with a lot more influence than the average engineer, an engineering leader is strategically poised to be able to unearth more opportunities for innovation in their team’s everyday. Lest you believe otherwise, the artificial constraints on innovation in a typical organization certainly do apply to them. In fact, leaders are the ones often expected to uphold these constraints in order to ensure the delivery of the outcomes business demands from time to time.
We can explore the opportunities available to a leader (a manager, a director, or anyone with sufficient influence over a team) from two different perspectives - creating the right climate for innovation to occur and leveraging strategies to make things happen.
CLIME
Cultivating a climate where innovation can regularly be practiced requires an engineering leader to juggle a number of balls. The balls change from organization to organization, but usually include the following:
Providing air cover for your teams so they can do their creative best
Preaching innovation, and then practicing what you preach
Managing expectations in both directions - with leadership and their team
Creating the right incentives and reward systems
Managing the fall-out of failed attempts
A lot of activities are involved in this exercise, so let us break this cultivation process down using a cheesy acronym - CLIME.
Consciousness
Your company already has some 9-odd values each employee must practice, that leaders are expected to embody. Bring the conversation around innovation into the forefront, alongside these values, so that it shares the same shelf space as customer empathy, craftsmanship, quality, agility, and the other 5 company values. The idea is to make it natural to talk about creativity and act as a good shepherd for the most practical ideas your team comes up with.
Leadership
You want to be doing everything in the open, which means it is necessary to buy support from leadership through transparency in investments and outcomes. It helps if leadership is also seen to be visibly backing creativity, at a minimum by giving away prizes to Hackathon winners. So get them to dress up for the ceremonies.
Iterate
Perfection is the enemy of all progress, especially when it comes to peripheral initiatives like innovation that could have the rug pulled under them at any time. Bring an iterative attitude, taking one step at a time, being prepared to context switch to more pressing initiatives business will often demand out of the blue.
Mentorship
The sprout of an idea needs nurturing, and leaders can help match experience with youthful ambition to ensure problems that are picked really matter, are appropriately scoped for success, and are aligned with organization priorities.
Environment
Innovation needs a nurturing environment where failures and successes are equally celebrated as learning interventions. Leaders help create Space and Time as an investment toward the innovation, record the Impact that is reaped by the organization as an outcome, and follow up to Celebrate to ensure a feedback loop is whipped up.
Ladies and gentlemen - cultivate the CLIME.
Strategies
While CLIME is necessary, it is often not sufficient. Leaders that really care need to force things to happen. In many organizations, we might want to think of determined leaders as magicians with many tricks up their sleeve. Let’s call them strategies for now, though. The keen eye will note that the strategies below all share two common traits - Patience and Opportunism.
Maintain a Backlog
When opportunity knocks your door, if you must ask for time to go dress up, opportunity will go knock another door. An actively maintained backlog of feasible, pragmatic and valuable innovative items is the best way to be prepared for any opportunity space and/or time offers up to let loose and innovate.
A backlog also signals that your team cares about this kind of work and the progress that comes through it. Of course, a backlog that is only added to, but not removed from, is at risk of being called an overflowing trash can. To ensure your backlog is actively shaved from time to time,
Offer the easier ones as a “Good First Task” to new team members
Setup Innovation Days and burn through some of the Backlog
Offer some to Engineers who seek to stretch and maybe eye a promotion.
Merge and Conquer
Technical debt and innovation backlogs suffer a common fate - we are happy to keep kicking the can down the road. A trained eye can however find opportunities where a backlog item blissfully comes together with a pressing business priority, making them Better Together. This is the proverbial “Two Mangoes with one Stone”, that can be sold to leadership as “Made for Each Other”, in order to extract the extra time and resources that might often be required with a change in approach.
Practical examples of merging and conquering that teams I have worked with successfully deployed might help nail this concept.
Two for one offer on upgrades
You need to upgrade your runtime (say Ruby or NodeJS) to the latest. This is painful because you are still deploying build artefacts, or worse code, directly to VMs. You realize this would be easier with containers. You also realize you will need another upgrade in 6 months.
Merge and Conquer!
You deploy your services with the new runtime using container builds and seamlessly switch your deploy automation and infrastructure at the same time.
Bonus: The next upgrade in 6 months will be twice as easy.
Decouple like you mean it
As a platform service, you were too tightly coupled with partner services. You hit peak interest and everyone wants to onboard. The next partner is ready, now. You pick one coupling you want to break that also creates an incentive for this partner - better security, lower latency, picture perfect design consistency, etc - and sell it as a must-have for the onboarding “project”.
Merge and Conquer!
When the next partner arrives, pick another coupling and repeat.
Bonus: Each onboarding now becomes shorter and less riskier.
Measure and Conquer
A weight loss program is aided by tracking weight and calorie intake, the idea being developing consciousness about progress (or the lack of it) and taking the necessary interventions. In a similar vein, choosing actionable metrics that can act as a mirror to your team, helps trigger interventions, often in the form of innovative leaps, that end up improving the overall health of your team.
Choosing the right metric
Choosing a metric is an art, more than science, mainly because the right metric helps bring about outcomes that your organization cares about. Did we want to be more secure? More agile? Contain expenses? Improve customer satisfaction? There’s a metric for that! Your task as a leader is to set an aspirational target and ensure leadership is aligned with your choice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Org outcome | X-Axis | Y-Axis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Agility | Release Frequency | # of engineers Customer Satisfaction | L4 Tickets. | Lead time to deploy Bottomline. | Traffic supported | Cloud spend ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If your organization follows the OKR practice, these goals could be good KRs when properly aligned.
Be mindful of Goodhart’s law
Goodhart’s law warns leaders that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This should guide leaders to be mindful of the unexpected outcomes an incentive for chasing a metric might create. It is also simultaneously true that you cannot affect something that you cannot measure.
One way to address this dichotomy is to use the metric oriented goals for a short period to help inculcate the right habits in a team, at which point, the metrics are promoted to a set of hygiene measures any good team usually upholds. For example, an agility goal may be used to get to a daily deployment regimen, at which point, focus shifts to new goals whilst aspiring to maintain this new found habit of deploying everyday.
Business as usual
It goes without saying that the biggest challenge a leader faces is baking all this in to the rigor and rhyme of delivering business outcomes alongside a plan that often spans multiple teams, only one of them being yours. The last thing you need is to be found slipping on BAU goals whilst knocking innovation outcomes out of the park.
Maintaining this delicate balance while offering the right environment for your team to regularly innovate is an art, and I hope the ideas here help you jumpstart on your journey. Don’t forget, your engineers also seek the same and the mature ones can be great partners in this journey - you are not alone!