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INNOVATION JAMS – AGILE INNOVATIONNils Davis, Product Manager

For Silicon Valley P-Camp 2011

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Agenda

What is an Innovation Jam? How we did it Outcomes

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Innovation Jam – What Is It?

Short focused period of “innovation”– Think and act outside the box– Learn some new technologies– Work with different people– Collaborate in a different and very focused way– Do stuff at a different pace than the day to day

Improve productivity and creativity Ours took place over about a week– 1 week of idea gathering and collaboration– 1 weekend of development

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How

Gather ideas from community– Had a set of suggested categories: usability, visualization, BI,

mobility, etc. Elaborate and commit Choose Elaborate some more Commit some more Develop Present

All in a very short time

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Gathering Ideas

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Gathering Ideas

38 ideas 250 comments Lots of votes

Not just comments and voting but– “Are you willing to work on this idea?”

Competition started at this point!

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Selection

Exec committee– Normal exec criteria – ROI, target customer, cost, immediate

impact to market, etc.– Execs engaged the whole time (and sponsored!)

Top five ideas then go to “code jam” Teams rejiggered as needed

– PM– Designer (shared)– Developers (including an architect, usually)– QA

Idea gathering and selection – 1 week total

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Thoughts So Far?

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Execution/Development aka “Code Jam”

Over 1 weekend– Friday morning Pacific to Sunday evening Pacific– (Friday night India to Monday morning India)

Highly distributed– Open Skype chat– Dev in the “cloud”– Lots of emails

All teams were working on new technologies (to them)– iPad– Mobile (HTML 5)– Sencha for visualization– Google Docs API

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End Game

Final presentation on Monday morning– Refined “marketing” presentation– Demo

All teams but one had working code Execs selected winning team and runners up– Prizes awarded

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Lessons Learned

One of the projects is nearly in production, expected later this year Lots of coding got done! But… … The prototype is not the product

– All required 2+ more FTE months of dev to get to v1– One weekend is not enough for a product

Many have been reviewed with customers– All are on the roadmap– In normal prioritization queue

Ideal for testing ideas Teams *loved* it

– Especially opportunity to learn/work in new technologies– Prizes may have motivated, but intrinsic motivation was more important

Everyone in the company had a chance to contribute to product progress– 80% of Accept people involved in one or more phases

We *will* do it again

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Discussion