Leading by example: How tech leaders can model innovation and creativity

Innovation. Companies, especially tech-driven organizations, talk about it, promote it and strive to continually accomplish it. Name almost any major brand, and it’s most likely listed as one of its core values. But what does it really mean, why is it so critical to business success and most importantly, how can you foster a culture of innovation in your own organization?

As the Chief Technology Officer of commercetools , delivering innovation is my job. When I joined the fledgling startup as a software engineer in 2012, we didn’t even have a product. I was hired as part of a small team to build software that met the vision of our co-founder and CEO, Dirk Hoerig . He had an idea for a commerce solution that, instead of using traditional monolith architecture, decoupled the business operations backend from the frontend user interface. His thought was that this “headless” approach could make it easier for brands to transition from single-channel eCommerce (on a desktop) to a multichannel environment — and he was right.

Of course, as with many new innovations,? it took years for the industry to embrace headless commerce. Today, as Gartner ? recently acknowledged in its 2023 Magic Quadrant? for Digital Commerce, “Being 100% API-enabled or “headless” ready is now table stakes.”

However, to remain relevant in the industry, commercetools has to continually deliver innovative products to enable our global customers to thrive in the ever-evolving digital commerce landscape. And, we’re not alone in this quest. As all technology-driven organizations understand, the only constant is change, and today things are happening faster than ever.?

I often make this joke, “My milk is lasting longer than your framework.”? And, it’s true. Even if it can be annoying sometimes, tech product companies have to keep delivering cool ideas to continue to compete. From a cultural point of view, this means embracing the fact that innovation is driven by the people in your organization —?every person contributing their domain expertise to fuel innovation.

To me, innovation is finding the gap, the sweet spot,?where you can put something new in. And you want everyone involved, and your product and tech people really need to be invested in it. One of the most critical things you can do is actually provide time to allow them to think outside of the box. Instead of filling their schedules with tasks, give them the freedom and space to be creative and explore ideas.

It’s also important to recognize that innovation isn’t just about delivering something new, it’s also about improving existing products. Of course, you want to distinguish yourself by always having something different than your competitors in the market. That’s how you win customers, keep them happy and gain new ones. It's not that eCommerce is fundamentally changing now, but today you can also think about innovation as combination. For example, it’s possible to take a new trend, combine it with existing technology, and create a great, innovative product out of it.

It’s definitely more difficult to create a culture of innovation in the current work environment with teams spread out all over the globe working remotely. You don’t get to have those water cooler moments where brilliant ideas can emerge when you start talking to someone you don’t work with on a day-to-day basis. A marketing person could meet someone in tech or a sales leader could start chatting with someone in people operations, and sometimes the combination of different domain expertise spurred new ideas. You have to make explicit time for this. You have to create those moments.?

Here are some of the ways we do this at commercetools:

1. Commercecoffee: It’s a company-wide program where employees are paired up with someone they don’t know once a month to create new connections. In engineering, we adapted this idea and created what we call “Tech Time” — but we’re actually talking about renaming it “Innovation Time” because that’s what it’s intended to be.?
2. Shared Learnings: During our weekly meetings I ask each of my team members to share their learnings. Even if it’s something that didn’t work, it’s a good way for other people to gain insight from the knowledge you’ve gained. I also request they write it down as well. That way it can be received asynchronously as well.?
3. Gather: I implemented the use of this software with teams to aid collaboration. It’s easy to use, helps people stay focused and offers a bunch of cool innovative tools. It’s also integrated into Google Meet which we use at commercetools. It’s an awesome combination — it makes collaborating online much better.

Another thing I do with my team to inspire brainstorming, is plant a small seed. I’ll bring my team a proposal, and maybe it has gaps by intention. I give them context and I give them permission to kill my proposal. This gets them talking and coming up with their own ideas that might actually solve the problem. So, I become the trigger point. If they totally destroy my proposal, I’m fine with it because we’ll end up with something absolutely awesome.

Innovation happens by trial and error. Business and tech leaders have to accept that it comes with risk, and sometimes failure. To prove the ideas and theories in your head, you have to experiment to see if they’ll actually work. And sometimes it involves a lot of iterations, especially when you discover, “No, that's not correct,” and then you try again.

One way to avoid risk is by using “production-like” environments for testing. This way you don’t harm any customers and you keep your operations safe. You want to be as ready as possible before launching a real test.?

As a company, you have to be willing to put time, money and people into validating your ideas. What we’ve learned at commercetools over the last 10 years is to cap our risk by setting a fixed time or monetary budget. Sometimes things don’t work out, so you stop the project and document what you learned from it. Other times it all comes together and you end up with a new product on the market, like commercetools Checkout .

While innovation often happens when people put their minds together to solve a problem, there are many cases where an individual acts on an idea that makes a big impact. For example, a few open source projects at commercetools were born from a single person who put in extra time — their free time — to create a solution for a problem they spotted. Sangria, which is the open-source implementation in Scala in GraphQL, was developed by someone on my team. Not only do we use it at commercetools but it’s also used by other companies including X (formerly Twitter).

Another interesting example is that one of our engineers created the technology that enables some of the unique features of commercetools Composable Commerce . He now holds the patent for it. It’s wonderful recognition for this person, and inspirational to others on the team.

I think it all comes back to the combination thing I mentioned earlier. There are countless great products out there, but there’s always the possibility to make improvements or create something that works better. You just have to take the time, put in the effort and think creatively — just like the apocryphal story of the Egg of Columbus.?

Innovation is rarely just as simple as a click from a proven idea to a product that can be used by billions of end users. It’s an evolution, each time you succeed or fail, you learn. As long as you have a risk/failure boundary set up, you can keep things balanced.

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