How to Foster Creative Thinking in Tech Innovation

Should you try Google’s famous “20% time” experiment to encourage innovation? We tried this at Duolingo years ago. It didn’t work. It wasn’t enough time for people to start meaningful projects, and very few people took advantage of it because the framework was pretty vague. I knew there had to be other ways to drive innovation at the company. So, here are 3 other initiatives we’ve tried, what we’ve learned from each, and what we're going to try next. 💡 Innovation Awards: Annual recognition for those who move the needle with boundary-pushing projects. The upside: These awards make our commitment to innovation clear, and offer a well-deserved incentive to those who have done remarkable work. The downside: It’s given to individuals, but we want to incentivize team work. What’s more, it’s not necessarily a framework for coming up with the next big thing. 💻 Hackathon: This is a good framework, and lots of companies do it. Everyone (not just engineers) can take two days to collaborate on and present anything that excites them, as long as it advances our mission or addresses a key business need. The upside: Some of our biggest features grew out of hackathon projects, from the Duolingo English Test (born at our first hackathon in 2013) to our avatar builder. The downside: Other than the time/resource constraint, projects rarely align with our current priorities. The ones that take off hit the elusive combo of right time + a problem that no other team could tackle. 💥 Special Projects: Knowing that ideal equation, we started a new program for fostering innovation, playfully dubbed DARPA (Duolingo Advanced Research Project Agency). The idea: anyone can pitch an idea at any time. If they get consensus on it and if it’s not in the purview of another team, a cross-functional group is formed to bring the project to fruition. The most creative work tends to happen when a problem is not in the clear purview of a particular team; this program creates a path for bringing these kinds of interdisciplinary ideas to life. Our Duo and Lily mascot suits (featured often on our social accounts) came from this, as did our Duo plushie and the merch store. (And if this photo doesn't show why we needed to innovate for new suits, I don't know what will!) The biggest challenge: figuring out how to transition ownership of a successful project after the strike team’s work is done. 👀 What’s next? We’re working on a program that proactively identifies big picture, unassigned problems that we haven’t figured out yet and then incentivizes people to create proposals for solving them. How that will work is still to be determined, but we know there is a lot of fertile ground for it to take root. How does your company create an environment of creativity that encourages true innovation? I'm interested to hear what's worked for you, so please feel free to share in the comments! #duolingo #innovation #hackathon #creativity #bigideas

The biggest threat to innovation isn't lack of ideas - it's how we handle the silence in meetings. When I first started leading engineering teams, I interpreted quiet rooms as agreement. I've since learned that silence often masks the most crucial feedback your team isn't sharing. The conventional wisdom suggests that quiet meetings indicate alignment or that 'no questions means clarity.' This assumption could be costing your company its next breakthrough. What I've discovered through leading hundreds of innovation meetings: 1. Your most insightful team members frequently hold back their best ideas during group discussions 2. The fear of being wrong in front of peers often outweighs the potential recognition for being right 3. Teams calibrate their responses based on how the first 1-2 people react to an idea This creates a dangerous cycle where innovative ideas die in silence, not in debate. The solution isn't more brainstorming sessions or 'innovation workshops.' Instead, I've found success by: 1. Deliberately seeking private feedback after group sessions - the insights shared in these conversations often contradict the public consensus 2. Creating space between ideation and evaluation - allowing teams to submit thoughts anonymously before any group discussion 3. Actively challenging the first positive responses - this signals that critical thinking is valued over quick agreement The most valuable innovations I've seen didn't emerge from loud, energetic brainstorming sessions. They came from quiet thinkers who initially kept their controversial ideas to themselves. What's the most innovative idea you've seen that was initially met with silence? #techleadership #innovation #leadership

Innovation goes against intuition. We emphasize high quality, high productivity, high performance. However, this culture puts the incentive and reward on doing it right the first time. We internalize this mindset around being “the best” and doing it right, but this isn’t how we innovate. We need to shift our mindset from doing it right the first time, to taking actions that will lead to learning. ❓ What assumptions can we test in our work?  ❓ What can we do quick and cheap to learn? ❓ How can we take a failure and turn it into a learning opportunity? Organizations with learning cultures foster a better chance for innovation to thrive. How do we cultivate a learning culture on our teams? 🤔 Adopt retrospectives -  Don’t assume retrospectives are happening - put some structure to them. Build into your organization’s process a continuous learning culture by committing to retrospectives and capturing the insights from your recent endeavours. Adopt a “what did we learn?” mindset and reflect regularly. 👏 Reward failure - If we want it to be OK to fail and learn from our mistakes, we need to make it safe to fail. Incentivize failures by celebrating them as learning opportunities, and congratulating team members for deciding to shut something down based on data. Don’t base high performance on how perfect the work is the first time, but on how much we learned, and grew the idea or program over time, pivoting based on insights. ✍ Capture insights - It’s one thing to do the retrospective, but how do we take our learnings and not lose them? Building institutional knowledge means going beyond the meeting and archiving the key learnings, code, templates, materials, and adopting a practice of continuous iteration to operations that factors in those learnings. You have to build cycles in to reflect, and make time to invest in composting the good stuff so it doesn't get lost and have to be reinvented down the line. #innovation #design #leadership #designthinking This is the first of a 3-part series of posts I'm doing this week on innovation. Connect with me for more!

I am constantly thinking about how to foster innovation in my product organization. Building teams that are experts at execution is the easy part—when there’s a clear problem, product orgs are great at coming up with smart solutions. But it’s impossible to optimize your way into innovation. You can’t only rely on incremental improvement to keep growing. You need to come up with new problem spaces, rather than just finding better solutions to the same old problems. So, how do we come up with those new spaces? Here are a few things I’m trying at Duolingo: 1. Innovation needs a high-energy environment, and a slow process will kill a great idea. So I always ask myself: Can we remove some of the organizational barriers here? Do managers from seven different teams really need to say yes on every project? Seeking consensus across the company—rather than just keeping everyone informed—can be a major deterrent to innovation. 2. Similarly, beware of defaulting to “following up.” If product meetings are on a weekly cadence, every time you do this, you are allocating seven days to a task that might only need two. We try to avoid this and promote a sense of urgency, which is essential for innovative ideas to turn into successes. 3. Figure out the right incentive. Most product orgs reward team members whose ideas have measurable business impact, which works in most contexts. But once you’ve found product-market fit, it is often easiest to generate impact through smaller wins. So, naturally, if your org tends to only reward impact, you have effectively incentivized constant optimization of existing features instead of innovation. In the short term things will look great, but over time your product becomes stale. I try to show my teams that we value and reward bigger ideas. If someone sticks their neck out on a new concept, we should highlight that—even if it didn’t pan out. Big swings should be celebrated, even if we didn’t win, because there are valuable learnings there. 4. Look for innovative thinkers with a history of zero-to-one feature work. There are lots of amazing product managers out there, but not many focus on new problem domains. If a PM has created something new from scratch and done it well, that’s a good sign. An even better sign: if they show excitement about and gravitate toward that kind of work. If that sounds like you—if you’re a product manager who wants to think big picture and try out big ideas in a fast-paced environment with a stellar mission—we want you on our team. We’re hiring a Director of Product Management: https://lnkd.in/dQnWqmDZ #productthoughts #innovation #productmanagement #zerotoone