Post-it notes, microwaves, penicillin, and Gmail: What do these four wildly successful products have in common?
Each product was a result of an employee side project, highlighting the importance of giving employees time to think creatively, experiment, and innovate. Google, for example, became well known for ‘20% time,’ a company policy that allowed Google employees to spend 20% of their work on projects that inspired and interested them.
To imbue a sense of innovation, engineering leaders should adopt practices that encourage their employees — particularly software engineers — to think creatively and flex their problem-solving skills.
Developer freedom sparks innovation, not aimlessness
If your company runs or builds software, engineers are at the center of your company’s value and revenue. As leaders, it’s imperative to recognize that software engineering is a creative profession. They’re a passionate group, and they want to build and deliver an elegant or clever product. At the same time, it can be a challenge to harness that passion and talent to drive business goals. Encouraging them to deliver amazing outcomes means giving them creative freedom and the time to explore — and that doesn’t mean sacrificing productivity.
Splunk’s annual report State of Observability 2024: Charting the Course to Success, uncovers a group of organizations that are pulling ahead of the pack in terms of observability maturity. Developers at these leading organizations spend about 38% more time on innovation versus routine tasks like maintenance, alert handling, and configuration.
These advanced software engineering teams aren’t aimlessly tinkering, either. At these organizations, they find and fix issues 2.8x faster than their peers in the beginning stage of maturity, which suggests that routine tasks aren’t falling by the wayside. Rather, these teams automate and speed up maintenance, freeing up engineers’ time to be creative. They’re also typically on the leading edge when it comes to getting new functionality into the hands of users — doing so at 8.6x the rate of beginning organizations. They push code faster and experience higher change success rates.
One reason for this increased productivity is that the less time software engineers need to spend chasing down problems and keeping track of the mental state of the applications they support, the more time they can spend in a ‘flow state.’ A Harvard Business Review study that knowledge workers are more productive when they can work in uninterrupted blocks of time.
Not only can software engineers be more productive with time to innovate, but they can make better decisions. Let’s say an engineer is tasked with adding records to a database. An engineer with time to problem-solve can consider every angle. For example, what kind of data is the user going to store in the database? Will the data be used to train an LLM? What are its future use cases? Is a standard relational database even the right place to store this data, or should it perhaps be in a NoSQL store? It’s not a stretch to say that an engineer with time to experiment will create a more functional, future-proofed product.
All that’s to say, giving engineers room to experiment can lead to better observability outcomes.
Fostering a culture of innovation
At its core, a culture that encourages innovation also encourages freedom, autonomy, and trust. Consider these strategies to foster innovation within your engineering team.
Set up the framework to make innovation successful. An organization that encourages freedom isn’t one without rules or limits. In fact, some guardrails are necessary for great innovation and helps keep outcomes aligned to company goals.
Platform engineering is one example of a discipline that can help encourage innovation by bringing standardization. A whopping 90% of State of Observability respondents say their platform engineers successfully standardized operations. This helps developers spend less time wrangling infrastructure and more time innovating on features. A platform engineering team can determine what language a software engineering team codes in, for example — which helps steer projects to be more useful rather than chaotic.
Empower engineering with the ‘why’ behind decisions. The best software engineering teams feel ownership of the product and autonomy in how it's built. In fact, the 12 Agile principles explain that collaboration with the business and the flexibility to work with changing requirements are essential for building good software. But oftentimes, engineering teams aren’t aware of the underlying goals or business context because it is not communicated by leadership. Without context, a software engineer has a limited view of the challenge at hand and is thereby limited in how they can best solve it.
Leaders should communicate broader goals to their software engineering teams, and then trust that they’ll design a system to align with those goals. Encourage the team to take risks, and reward them when those risks pay off.
Give engineers time to be creative. It sounds counterintuitive — a productive engineering team grinds out code 40 straight hours a week, right? While the hustle mentality can reap short-term results, it’s a surefire way to burn out the team. Burnout is already a prevalent industry problem; 66% say critical staff has left due to burnout in the past year.
Every hour of a software engineer’s day shouldn’t be allocated to hands-on-keyboard coding work. Even without encouraging creative freedom, engineers must spend time thinking. The best solution to a thorny business problem often isn’t the first one that pops into one’s mind. Time spent thinking through the consequences of choosing a specific algorithm or technology is extremely valuable – likely more so than time spent writing code.
Engineers thrive when they have time in their day to think and problem solve openly and creatively. Hosting hackathons can encourage creativity among software engineering teams, if done properly. Ideally, organizations should incentivize participants by investing in their ‘hacks’ and turning them into product features. One of the greatest intrinsic rewards is seeing your idea come to life and impact the company in a meaningful way.
Get the full State of Observability 2024 report for more insights and findings on how leading organizations set themselves apart, including the benefits of platform engineering and the role of AI in observability.
