5 Lessons from a “Top Workplace for Innovators”
Today, Synchrony was named a “Top Workplace for Innovators” by Fast Company. It’s a distinction that I’m proud of, validating Synchrony’s years of work to create a culture where everyone feels empowered to explore new ideas, and opportunities to deploy tests in pursuit of knowledge are encouraged.
Getting here was a journey — through trial & error, pivots and changes, deployments and failures.
When I began my career in product innovation a decade ago, I was struck by how difficult it was to find out how other organizations built their teams and approached their work.
Our approach won’t fit every organization, but over time, our playbook has evolved to a place that I hope it could help you evaluate your own Innovation.
1) Take Time to Develop Your Mandate
As an innovation program leader, the biggest threat is becoming a “catch all” for every initiative that wasn’t prioritized, a test bed for shiny objects, or a directionless group building whatever comes to mind.
Those approaches won’t lead to repeatable success.
Our Innovation team’s mandate can be summed up in an elevator pitch:
We leverage Synchrony’s Innovation Ecosystem to identify & plot trends on our radar, aligning teams to strategic strike zones that match their unique skillset. Our teams build products to meet the trends and deploy to the market in areas of strategic significance for the company and our partners.
Some facts we all agree to:
Our time horizons are Now, Near, & Next, measured in years.
We are an integrated lab, working with our talented agile teams. We are not a moonshot (isolated) lab.
Our teams have unique core competencies to build various products.
Core competencies (build, incubate, R&D) will determine which strike zone teams and products align to.
We will focus on trends within our strike zone, and monitor (but not build) those outside it.
Success is defined by key metrics.
2) Don’t Assume Innovation is “Just Happening”
Innovation will primarily spark from two places — seemingly random, almost kismet interactions among team members, and facilitated events.
Both are critical to success.
While the first will be the most exciting, it also often results in incremental innovation. Disruptive innovation will frequently require teams to come together to deeply evaluate, understand, and explore multiple pathways that are yet to be charted.
By creating opportunities for facilitation, you can get large parts of the organization aligned to a trend, which they can bring back to their areas of focus to build products through their unique lens.
Our innovation toolbox looks like this:
· Rapid Prototyping — Problems to be Solved with Technology
· Hacking — Technology that can be used to solve problems
· Exploring — Long-term independent thinking challenges
· Ideating — Quick sessions on a single topic
3) Embrace the Slog
From the outside in, a role on an Innovation team is one of the most exciting jobs, but the wins seen by the outside are less than 1% of the work.
Recognize early on that two competing things can be true — innovation is the most fun you will have, and innovation is a slog.
You will have to grind it out to make seemingly small, incremental progress. One of the most common things you’ll do is attempt to paint a vision others can’t see. You’ll need to tell your story consistently, with the same excitement and energy, to solicit buy-in from teams with competing priorities.
Your team will need to be a safe space — to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, a culture of “Disagree and Commit” requires trust, but powers meaningful change. It will not be uncommon to have multi-hour sessions where you can’t find an answer the team agrees upon.
But the slog is where the real innovation happens. It’s the thing of breakthroughs. The place where deep domain expertise is created, and new knowledge is formed. It’s where your team will feel confident in being right, and confident in being wrong.
And to maintain an effective team culture, your leaders should acknowledge the slog regularly. Validating the team’s feelings and frustrations will remind everyone that this is expected.
4) Data Will Empower You
Rooting an innovation team in data feels like a paradox for many, because data doesn’t feel very creative. But data can open the new pathways to creativity that you hadn’t before imagined.
In corporate product development, data is a language that’s universally understood. Leadership, peers, and stakeholders likely all use data to make decisions, so showing up empty handed will bring them out of their comfort zone before you have a chance to paint your vision.
The difference is that many metrics used throughout your organization may not make sense on a team that is empowered to fail fast. ROI can’t be measured for years. Active users will discourage incremental learnings. Revenue will take your eye off the customer needs.
Within Synchrony, we use metrics that motivate the success of Innovation teams, measuring speed to make decisions, alignment to trends, and improvement in expertise among our teams.
Some of the data points we use are:
Time to Value — how quickly can we define, design, develop, and deploy our products, measured by the speed to a decision, not speed to success.
Alignment with Trends — how prepared our teams are for changes coming.
Weighted Backlog Scoring — an seasoned model to take the subjective (good ideas) and make them objective (right idea to focus on).
Win/Loss Ratio — how many of our projects deploy, vs. how many stall during a pre-deployment phase.
5) Compare, But Don’t Become
Your competitors are innovating too, and your leaders and peers know it. One of the most common discussions I have is about what new ideas we’ve seen in our space and how we think it’ll play out.
The risk of comparison is that your innovation strategy becomes a worse, delayed version your competitors.
You need to know what they’re doing, but you don’t need to do what they’re doing.
Comparing your story and market tests with others can help inform where you see trends growing or shrinking, but the unknown variables are too great for you to use that information effectively to change your own approach. What are their time horizons? How do they define success? What did they try but kill that you never saw? What is their mandate? Do they feel they have a right to win in areas you don’t?
Our story is our own. We develop our own trend radar, plotting emerging and disruptive changes as we see them from our vantage point. Other companies will see them differently — they might be the catalyst for a key trend, while we would build a product after the catalyst occurs. Those distinctions will affect time horizons, opportunity, and degree of impact to the organization.
See the full list of Top Workplaces for Innovators here.
