Building Truly Innovative Engineering Teams

10 Strategies That Always Work

Welcome Leaders!

Innovation is the holy grail 🏆 for CTOs & tech companies.

But it’s one of the hardest things to achieve on a consistent basis.

Leaders & execs spend unhealthy amounts of time viewing videos of Steve Jobs hoping to capture some inspiration.

So why aren’t more companies & engineering teams innovating?

Let’s look at the reasons why and put in place the right, winning strategies.

Cheers,

Bobby

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Every CTO wants a truly innovative engineering team but very few are able to actually build them — for many different reasons.

But, it’s actually possible to make it happen.

There’s no single formula for it, however. Instead the art of building a truly innovative engineering team lies in knowing a handful of winning strategies that only the 1% understand. And then carefully adopting those strategies into your company, team, etc.

The strategies aren’t easy to implement though. They are risky and not always accepted. But that’s why most companies don’t really innovate all that much.

If you can learn these ideas yourself and then get your team and key stakeholders in your organization to embrace them, you have a chance of actually transforming engineering.

One caveat: when you read through these strategies some are going to seem obvious at first glance. But as you’re digesting them try to think hard about what it would take to REALLY execute on them.

They may be easy to conceive of here, but difficult to implement in real life which is why a lot of companies don’t innovate.

The Rarity of Innovation

Before we dive into the innovation strategies let’s make sure we level-set on how rare innovative engineering teams actually are.

I would rate them at about 1%. Yes, just 1%!

Out of 100 companies only 1 will have an actually innovative engineering team. So, what you’re trying to achieve is very, very rare.

What’s interesting about the 1% who innovate is that their company mission doesn’t seem to matter. The market doesn’t seem to matter either. Even the particular products that are being built don’t seem to matter. Surprisingly, the technology stack doesn’t seem to matter either (I’ve seen some total rockstar teams back in the day writing Coldfusion, for example). 😨