Innovation at Trade Ledger - Lego Time
- Matthew Rigley (Deactivated)
- Neil Ludwig (Deactivated)
Written by Matthew Rigley, Talent Acquisition
Here at Trade Ledger innovation is in our DNA! We really strive to create a culture of innovation where any team member can share their ideas to transform the business for the better. That's why we have recently commenced a new initiative encouraging all of our Engineering team to take time away from their regular work for an afternoon every week.
The purpose of this is to allow them to focus on their own pieces of innovative work that isn’t directly related to our immediate product feature work. Here at Trade ledger we call this “Lego Time”.
The idea is simple - it's really that the team should spend a portion of their week exploring or working on projects that perhaps show no promise of paying immediate dividends but that may well reveal big opportunities down the road. This should really empower them to be more innovative and creative and we hope to make many significant advances happen in this manner.
Why do we need this?
In a startup environment its not uncommon for an Engineer to be expected to have quite a broad role scope - Developer, Part-time Product Manager, Customer Support, Infrastructure guru etc. In any start-up as the company grows, innovation usually slows down. As our business is scaling up our engineers are spending more time on software development but less time on the projects that they personally believe will really push the boundaries for our customers. Our aim is that Lego Time will give our engineers dedicated time of their own direction to spend on product innovation, features, plugins or additions that they think are important.
Could there be any downsides to Lego Time?
In short term there could be some concerns that taking Engineers time away from their regular work could mean slower and/or smaller releases. However, our long term thinking is that innovation will filter into our product and outweigh any potential short term release slow down.
How will we know if it successful?
This is quite a tricky question to answer. A key measure for us is going to be around us evaluating whether we’ve delivered more customer value given the time investment than we would have done normally. This value could be in terms of new features, improvements to existing features or even better internal systems.
Interested to see how this works in practice?
We’ll keep you updated on all the exciting things that come out of our “Lego Time” experiment. We’ll be hearing from our Engineers, Management and Founders on how they feel the initiative is tracking. Lets see what entrepreneurial innovation we can foster!
Keen to know more? Reach out to Matthew Rigley for a confidential chat on 0491170900