Innovate in Your Downtime

If this time of year is typically slow for you, give your engineering team space to innovate.

During the holiday season, most organizations take their foot off the proverbial pedal. While there are several companies who see November and December as their busiest time of year, the rest of us see the next few weeks as a montage of empty (that is, emptier than usual) buildings, quiet Slack/Teams workspaces, and out-of-office messages.

Stakes are low, and your people are relaxed—this is the perfect time to let your folks experiment. Their work may reveal new ways to create value for your customers, or unlock productivity by improving slow systems & processes. Here are some ways you can make that happen:

Prioritize developer experience work

I’m a firm believer in filling sprints with 3 different types of work—feature development, maintenance & support (bugs, “keeping the lights on”), and engineering & systems (developer experience, quality of life)—and changing that mix to meet business needs at any particular point in time. If you’re usually spending 60% of your sprints on feature development, spend 60% on quality of life improvements instead. Even if you have a dedicated platform or DevX team, you can distribute work to any engineers from feature teams who might be interested, simultaneously giving them an opportunity to learn something new. Just make sure no one brings production down.

Plan a mini-hackathon

Hackathons don’t always need to involve fancy meeting spaces and luxurious prizes. Put together something low-effort: come up with a theme, set some constraints, and see what kind of amazing work your people can produce. Let the prize be something relatively inexpensive, like a Creatjoy subscription box for each member of the winning team. Or simply provide the opportunity for the winning idea to be integrated into your product.

Build a proof of concept

Is there an AI idea you want to validate but haven’t had the time to do it? Does your team want to use some new tech? Put some engineers on an idea or two, and use your findings to inform your post-holiday priorities.

This is a great time to empower your people to be creative in a low-stress environment. If you need help defining systems and processes that allow your people to innovate year-round, let’s chat.

Enjoy the holiday season, folks!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.