Culture Clash Issue #288 - Enabling Innovation through Product Design
How team structure and company organization can lead to new ideas
There are many reasons why technology companies struggle to innovate. One of the reasons for innovation challenges is company growth. When a company grows from a small staff to 100+ people, it tends to change the way it's organized. At this point, things start to get more complicated.
This is how the story generally unfolds. For the first 1-2 years of a startup, the team tends to be small. There are no real managers. Everyone is an individual contributor (IC). Relationships between coworkers are fluid and collaborations happen spontaneously. Companies at this stage tend to have a loosely defined roadmap. When an interesting idea arises from a design exploration, it's relatively easy to pursue. John Kotter, a professor of leadership at HBS, describes this in the book Accelerate:
Many start-ups are organized more as networks than as hierarchies, because they need to be nimble and creative in order to grab opportunities.
When a company reaches a certain size, the organizing principle tends to change. The once flat team of collaborators shifts into departments, managers, and operational silos. The move to a hierarchical structure is a necessary change to enable company growth. It allows a company to hire tens of people and fit them into a scalable operating model.
With the hierarchy in place, employees tend to focus on their immediate team and manager. Work gets formalized into an official roadmap. The team focuses on roadmap execution.
Where does innovation fit in?
How does a company create the space and time necessary to invent new solutions? To solve the bigger product challenges?
I'm fascinated by companies that find clever ways to organize themselves for innovation. Snap, the makers of Snapchat, is one company that has figured this out.
Recently on Snap’s Engineering blog, I discovered an inspiring writeup. Meet Snap’s Design Engineers. The post is about Snap's hybrid engineering and design role. But it also provides great insight into how Snap organized itself for innovation.
Some of the key observations:
Snap has a small design team at the core of the company. The group is intentionally small. They work across the company and in close collaboration with leadership
The design team includes designers, engineers, and hybrids: design engineers.
Having a team dedicated to exploring high-value bets is what enables Snap to innovate.
This team has the bandwidth to explore new ideas. It also explores ideas and problems the rest of the company may have de-prioritized.
The team builds some early-stage prototypes. They test these concepts with small audiences pre-production. This helps validate bets and sunset ideas early when they don’t work. It saves valuable production engineering resources. It focuses the company on projects that have a high likelihood of success.
The Snap design team begins the exploration process with a targeted focus area. It can as specific as improving an existing product function. Often, it's something broad like building a new communication product. Ideas for these focus areas arise during focused design sprints or team brainstorms.
Of course Snap did not invent this approach. There are other companies organized in a similar way. Apple is probably the best example. How a company is organized can have a profound impact on its ability to innovate.
Think about this when starting your next company. 🙏🏻
5 Links
✍🏻 Wilson Miner Interview and Kevin Twohy Interview
Two excellent and highly recommended interviews with two leading product designers. Wilson Miner is currently a product designer at Apple. He formally led the design team at Rdio. He’s also designed at Facebook and Stripe. He’s the first featured interview in Brian Lovin’s new interview series, Staff Design. Kevin Twohy is one of the few product designers I know personally that has managed to carve out an impressive, independent career path. He’s designed experiences for Mirror, Daily Harvest, Casper, and Hello.
📱 Calmaria
I recently finished James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. It’s an excellent book on breathing and how breathing techniques can help heal the body and mind. Calmaria is a simple and effective app to help you practice one of these breathing techniques. The 4-7-8 method is simply inhaling for 4 seconds, holding your breath for 7 seconds, and exhaling for 8 seconds.
Hush is a new, highly recommend, free content blocker for safari. It will block the accept cookies popups on all sites as well as privacy-invasive tracking. Browse the web like it should be. “I’d recommend Hush to anyone who uses Safari” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball.
✍🏻 Architects Design ‘Little Island’ Getaway in NYC To Give City Dwellers a Touch of Nature
‘Little Island’ is an inspirational architectural project being built off the westside highway in manhattan around 14th street.
✍🏻 The iconic watches that inspired Apple Watch faces
A comprehensive post on the pedigree and history behind Apple Watch faces. Beautiful deep dive.