Using 100% of Your Company’s Brainpower

You may have heard that humans only use 10% of their brains, although scientists believe we use all of our brain every day. However, it’s not a stretch to say that many companies only use 10% of their brainpower.?

Signs of tech companies using only 10% of their brainpower:?

• Executives come up with most of the strategic ideas, then assign to the teams to deliver
• The tech team focuses on feature delivery vs business results
• Employees have innovative ideas but aren't sure how to get traction

What if you could use 100% of your company’s brainpower? In this article, I share some of my learnings and subsequent efforts to leverage company brainpower.?

Part I: Many Companies Try Hackathons

We’ve all experienced hackathons, which engage the tech org, and sometimes the business as well. People brainstorm and attempt to prove out ideas, achieving a fresh energy and flashes of innovation for a few days, which is a blast. By the next week, everyone settles back into their routine. Few hackathon ideas progress beyond a half-baked state, and can be a special kind of frustrating, with so much promise but so little impact. After hackathons, I used to wonder how we might better support the very real excitement and innovative thinking through to completion and actual results.?

Pros

Opportunity to innovative ?

Empowers people to share ideas

Fun for a few days

Cons

Results are usually half baked concepts

Few if any entries are ever completed

Little to no impact on business results

Rarely create an ongoing innovation culture?

Part II: Amazon’s Multiple Paths to Yes

In a 10% brainpower company, you have to get an idea approved through the gauntlet of your boss, boss’s boss, and their boss. This makes it hard for ideas from those on the front lines to ever come to fruition. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos championed a concept of “multiple paths to yes” as a means of empowering employees to circumvent the gauntlet and get exposure for their big ideas. While I was there, one of the paths was Operational Planning (“OP1” & “OP2”), Amazon’s version of an OKR process. Each team drafted an annual plan to be shared with a group of upper level managers, including big initiative proposals and headcount asks. The best initiatives made their way up the chain, with Jeff’s leadership team (S-Team) ultimately selecting a number of them as “S-Team goals” to be assigned out and tracked throughout the next year. A number of Amazon’s most famous programs were born during this process. What I gleaned from observing this process is that everyone was encouraged to come up with innovative and impactful ideas, and that the “winners” would get the full weight of the S-Team behind them.?

This process may sound similar to the gauntlet at most companies, but has some important differences: 1) dedicated avenue for proposing big initiatives; 2) engages the whole company with a bottoms up approach; 3) exposes your ideas to a broader group of decision makers; 4) leadership supports the initiatives that they believe have most potential.

Additionally, and more importantly in my book, Amazon focused on results, with plans being a means to an end, and flexible. A team’s goals were tied into overarching annual goals such as retail org goals to increase product selection and reduce product prices, or Ops goals like reducing costs and increasing delivery speed, etc. If your proposed initiatives didn’t get selected as S-Team goals, you were empowered to move ahead with your priorities using your dedicated resources and/or by partnering with a coalition of teams with shared goals. Also, if you later identified better opportunities than what you reviewed with senior leadership, you were held accountable to the result, not the plan, and were expected to pivot as needed. Achieving a plan (deliverables) without achieving the goal (results) was a fail; success was achieving the results.

This approach gave teams flexibility to innovate, and to pivot as needed, to achieve goals. This process could be stressful as you worked to complete your OP1 plans while frantically working your day job as you headed into Peak (the busiest time of year). Amazon achieved amazing results this way, but also sustained a relatively high employee turnover rate. For employees who thrived on the freedom and the pressure, it worked well.?

Pros

Dedicated way to propose big ideas

Bottoms up approach

Ideas shared with decision makers

Strong support for winning ideas

Cons

Stressful to complete OP1 plan on top of day job

May lead to higher turnover

Only a small % became S-team goals

Part III: Grubhub’s “Dagathon”: A Fun Way to Get Results

When I was later working at Grubhub, I was noodling on how to blow our DAGs (“Daily Average Grubs,” our orders per day metric) goal out of the water. How could I excite and mobilize the company to help achieve this primary goal? I knew that a hackathon could get everyone excited, but I was looking for a more sustained effort with measurable impact. And I wanted something more exciting than an OP1 process to engage a rapidly growing company.?

These thoughts bounced around my head one day as I headed out on a run around Roosevelt Island, the long, skinny island in New York’s East River between Manhattan and Queens. As my mind cleared, things fell into place and I had an epiphany. What if we made it a contest like a hackathon, but unlike a hackathon, we wouldn’t have judges to arbitrarily select winners based on half-baked prototypes? Instead, the winners would be based on actual A/B test results in production.?

There were a few things to sort out. How would we balance roadmapped company initiatives with a longer-term contest that required bandwidth from those same product, UX, and engineering teams? How long did the contest need to last so people had time to ideate, create, launch, and measure? And how would we ensure that it didn’t turn into an avalanche of messy prod releases that degraded the customer experience??

We decided to dedicate Fridays from 12-5 for people to work on their projects, and set it up to last for 10 weeks. Also, we made a rule that each project team was to include a product manager, UX designer, and engineer, to ensure that we maintained the highest quality user experience, and successfully launched the A/B test in production. With these details worked out, we kicked off what I christened the Dagathon.

It was a blast to see people coming out of the woodwork and self organizing to give their best ideas a go. It was clear that people had pent up ideas that were now being unleashed. It made think of The Beatle’s guitarist George Harrison, who had a growing backlog of his own compositions as he recorded his guitar parts for Lennon/McCartney tunes. He entered the post-Beatles phase with a TRIPLE solo album right out of the gate. And it had hits, baby!?

Making it a competition was energizing and really captured the excitement of a hackathon. It was a blast! Some worked on their entries nights and weekends because it didn’t feel like work; they were passion projects. The 10 week period made it possible for teams to iterate and test a few times until they had a bona fide winner. And there were a lot of DAGs winners shipped! It worked because people who usually didn’t have a say in the roadmap were let loose.?

By the end of the Dagathon, everyone knew what a DAG was, what our annual DAGs goal was, and most importantly, how to use their hypotheses to mine DAGs. We put a thermometer-shaped poster up on the wall to track progress towards our annual DAGs goal. People for whom it was previously unclear how to bring their ideas to life started to approach my team with their ideas for big DAGs winners, then we all celebrated the wins along the way. Cross functional groups were working together from ideation through build and measuring results, it was a beautiful thing, gamification of work!?

We ended up achieving our annual DAGs goal by late June, then doubled the goal and beat that too. Our stock went up 7x over the next 2.5 years, and our CEO (Matt Maloney) and CFO (Adam DeWitt) were liberal with their credit to teams that helped to drive these results.?

Pros

Achieved measurable results

Fun! Didn’t feel like work ?

Bottoms up approach

Upleved ongoing collaboration

Dedicated time for this exercise

Great way to educate the org on a metric

Cons

Not enough time to complete the biggest ideas

Didn’t engage the whole company

A/B tests aren’t a viable option for many tech orgs

Took some time away from the roadmap

Fun but intense; once a year was about right

Part IV: Pattern’s Innovation Cup - Creating a Global Innovation Culture

Mobilizing a global company like Pattern to innovate was a more ambitious undertaking than engaging a portion of the tech org on an important metric like we had done at Grubhub. I began ideating with a group of people on how to best encourage a culture of innovation at Pattern. We definitely wanted the fun and results focus of a Dagathon, plus elements of Amazon’s process including an emphasis on big ideas, from the bottom up, feeding into the annual planning process. It was also important for us to incorporate multiple paths to yes; not only would we promote some winners, but we wanted to encourage as many teams as possible to continue proving out their ideas.

The co-founders Mel Alder and Dave Wright were enthusiastic about the concept of an innovation contest, so we created the Innovation Cup, a competition open to everyone in the company. For each entry, self organizing, cross-functional teams drafted one-page proposals, then we scheduled time for teams to pitch their ideas to members of the executive team. We had great participation in year one, and by year two we had over 120 employees submit more than 70 entries. It was invigorating to hear the pitches from our worldwide teams, and to get to know the people who were helping Pattern achieve amazing things. Employees appreciated having their big ideas heard, as well as the exposure to the executive team.?

The contest was kicked off in Q1, finalists were selected by early Q2, and the final presentations were held in Q3. This gave teams time to prove out ideas and prepare to make their pitch to the whole company, and wrapped in time for inclusion in the Q4 annual planning process. After year one was complete, people were already brainstorming ideas for the next year. One team alone had over a dozen proposals for year two.

During year one, there were many good ideas that weren’t selected as finalists, but we encouraged these teams to keep at it. For some, we requested that they flesh out their plan and return for another pitch. Two of these “dark horse” candidates were later added as finalists, and one of them actually won the whole thing. As we moved into year two, this alternative path was defined even more, with the founders providing resources to teams beyond the finalists to encourage progress on as many promising ideas as possible.

Between years one and two we made changes to better engage our worldwide teams, such as switching the kickoff from HQ-only to a video kickoff that was distributed to offices worldwide, marketing efforts to increase awareness of the Innovation Cup for all of our offices, adding the reward of flying any worldwide finalists to HQ for the grand finale presentations, and streaming the grand finale live for our worldwide teams. This resulted in triple the global team participation for year two vs. year one.

The awards ceremony was a blast, with each final presentation sandwiched around employees sharing entertaining talents like singing, juggling, and dancing. We went with a live vote at the end, with employees selecting the overall winners. A number of the winning entries were built into our tech over the next year, and one was the basis for launching a new business. Every finalist team received RSUs (equity) awards, which led to even more participation in year two.

Pros

Lots of fun, great engagement

Attracted big ideas ?

Bottom up approach

Created a year-round innovation path

Company-wide involvement

Cons

Finished proof of concepts but not full solutions

Impact measurement was an estimation

Voting for winners was a subjective and potentially biased approach

Fun but intense; once a year would be the max

This Friday, September 27, ibrahim bashir and I will also be discussing these experiences on a virtual session that anyone is welcome to watch live. Here is the link to sign up for the Zoom session: https://lu.ma/z9hwodfl