#453 – Why it’s Hard to Innovate

This week we held an Innovation Retrospective.

At Parabol we are a small team and while the company celebrates its 10th birthday soon, I still think of Parabol as a young company. That’s reflected in how we talk and think about new product ideas. Last week in a 1:1 meeting we had this conversation again, about how we need to expand our meeting type offering. But we’ve been talking about this for many years now, so what’s holding us back?

Luckily we have the right tool for this and so we decided to create a custom Retro Template for this purpose. This week we held our retrospective and the results are in:

It’s difficult to think about new ideas when you’re knee deep in your day to day work. This limits my time to think about new ideas. Additionally as a developer I tend to think about new ideas mostly in terms of: How do I integrate these into our product? While this works good for small improvements, it’s limiting for grander ideas.

There is also comfort in working on the existing product and coming up with incremental improvements. We know what the problems are and how to tackle them. We know there are customers for it and our work is not going to waste. All these things are uncertain when working on something not proven yet.

In multiple company retreats we spent our time brainstorming new ideas. Everyone left excited and keen to try something new. The actual work in fleshing out the ideas to verify them and have something actionable was then left to a few individuals and the enthusiasm drizzled out as other members continued their day to day work on the current product. And while we all have some time allocated during Cool Down to work on something else than the core product, it’s tempting to continue working on just the same thing. It’s also just too easy to continue working in solitude during this time and not collaborate on something bigger.

The same also happened with hack weeks. While we worked in small groups on cool ideas, that’s not enough to work on any bigger ideas. Especially if the whole team should be on board, we need to also work as a team. So while we were innovating in the small, we missed the bigger picture.

So if you want your team to work on innovations, then:

As expected during the summer slowdown, we saw a modest dip across several key metrics this week.

…held our Cycle Retro as we wrap up Cycle 9. It was a nice continuation of our Innovation Retro held earlier in the week.

…tested the new meeting summary internally with our own Cycle 9 retro summary.

…begin the 2 week cool down from Cycle 9

…start to plan out our company-wide workshop that will take place during Cycle 10 to implement some of our learnings from the Innovation Retro