Last week I had the good fortune of meeting and speaking with Geoffrey Moore, author of the widely acclaimed books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. If you haven’t heard of him before, Geoff writes and speaks about the technology adoption lifecycle and the marketing and business strategies for successfully navigating this lifecycle. His basic premise follows the traditional technical adoption model first defined by Bohlen and Beal way back in 1957 and expanded on by Rogers. Here’s what the traditional adoption curve looks like:

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When considering what our customers really want from us, it’s important to not just give them exactly what they ask for. Sometimes, it takes some imagination to give them what they really want.

Consider this: Our customers say they want an oven that runs cooler in the kitchen and cooks faster. Do we set out to build a cooler oven? Do we try to defy the laws of physics and build a “faster” oven? No, we imagine what it is that would make our customers happy. We defy conventional wisdom, search for a solution outside of what currently exists, and provide a new, unique solution that meets their needs in a whole new way. What we give them is a microwave oven. And that’s exactly what Raytheon and Amana did back in 1965 and revolutionized the way we cook today.

I’ve heard people say that scrum teams don’t have a heart.  We plow through backlogs with our heads down.  We finish a project.  We start another and plow through the next backlog.  Story, plan, task, sprint, demo, retrospect, repeat.  Story, plan, task, sprint, demo, retrospect, repeat.  Where’s the heart?  When do scrum teams look beyond these super focused iteration based tasks and think about innovation.  I agree with this assessment.  I think that agile and scrum teams can get stuck in this rut.  Well, we’ve all heard about the Google 20%…20% of time spent working on innovation.  I like that, but can most organizations really afford 20% of our time to do free thinking?  Probably not, we’re not all making billions of dollars like Google.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about this dilemma.  Personally, I like something like a hackfest or hackathon.  Maybe after 6 weeks of focused development, your team gets a week to do some focused play.  A one week iteration…tell us what you’re going to work on…be innovative, do something cool and commit to it.  At the end of the week, same old same old…do a review.  Everyone DEMONSTRATES their cool idea.  Not a diagram, not a slideshow…demo something you can show us.

I think that unless you’re completely dominant in your market space, you need to be doing something like this to keep you innovative and on the competitive edge.  It’s the old innovation curves again.  You want to always be anticipating or defining what the next thing is.  If you don’t, you slide down the laggard side of the innovation curve and risk becoming irrelevant.  If you slide down that curve, it’s very difficult to get back up to that next innovation curve.  So, give your teams time to innovate…it’s good for your organization’s future, it’s good for your customers, and it’s good for the professional growth and health of your development teams.

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