Thoughts
Flex Time and Passion Projects
6 minute read
A lot has been written about Google's flexible creative time—individual contributors are given 20% of their time to do whatever “…they think will most benefit Google,” according to Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “This empowers them to be more creative and innovative.” Typically, engineers spend the time trying new projects, learning new technology, or participating in online and offline discussions about the role of engineering in the world. This flexible time is generally considered to be the source of innovations like Gmail and Google Earth.
Some people express skepticism that the concept really exists; Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and former employee of Google, famously said “I've got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google's 20% time. It's really 120% time.” But even if the program isn't as formalized as it might appear, it's clear that the company's looser work-time regulations are an effort to accelerate innovation.
Not all companies can emulate the 20% time, and not all companies strive to build a culture like Google's. But creative burnout is real and ubiquitous, and companies struggle to find ways to manage the constant pressure to deliver.
Mike Kruzeniski was the Senior Director of Design at Twitter and a former creative lead at Microsoft and Nokia. He oversaw a team of 35 designers, who worked near the engineers responsible for shipping all aspects of Twitter. To prevent creative burnout, he described that he would steer them towards three outlets for overcoming stress.
Whole-strategy vision projects.
A vision project is an exploration of a beautiful, idealized future. Often describing five years out, the vision project is used to help teams extract themselves from the minutia of product details. It is typically scenario-based, grounded in research, and without boundaries. Invisibility cloaks are okay because the intent is not believability as much as persuasiveness. A vision project is great for motivating individual contributors, and the results often act as strong internal (and even external) marketing collateral.
But there's a downside, Kruzeniski says; vision projects can be “…all-encompassing to the point that everybody knows they're not achievable. It just doesn't make sense to build products like ours in that way, sort of like rethink[ing] everything all at once.” Twitter can't stop what they are doing and suddenly unveil an entirely different product, so the team acknowledges these vision projects as inspirational but not practical.
Additionally, a blue-sky vision project runs the risk of alienating people knee-deep in shipping products. “One team is saying, ‘These guys don't get it. They don't get what it means to actually go build a product,' Kruzeniski says. “And the other team is going ‘These guys don't get it. They're not thinking about the future.'”
What-if projects.
A second form of exploratory project asks and answers, “what if?” about a specific product feature or capability. The creative team tries to provoke a lot of new iterations by considering what would happen if a business, technology, or design constraint were removed. These questions aren't aimed at actual implementation work—the intent is to create a series of open-ended vignettes.
These projects can focus on the UI (user interface) or more conceptually on the actual product capabilities. Kruzeniski offered two examples of “what-If” provocations:
What if Twitter had no tabs, and were just a timeline view? Twitter's web client displays “Home,” “Moments,” “Notifications,” “Messages,” and “Search” as destinations within the product. What if it didn't—how would the product change with that simpler set of capabilities?
What if Twitter were only for self-expression? People use twitter for a variety of activities, including reading news, participating in conversations, and expressing themselves. What if the product were optimized for self-expression—how would it change?
Making a physical thing.
Kruzeniski says that he often has his teams take breaks from their digital product work to make a physical item, like a book. He said a physical item is fast to make, inclusive, and harnesses a carefree form of creativity that isn't always present in real product work. “There's less on the line. There's a lot of stress in building real products, you have a lot on the line as far as the business and how users are going to adopt it or not adopt it. And all of that stuff is really important, but it can be stressful. Something as simple as a book feels like more raw creative.”
This artifact—a book, a poster, or a research report—can end up as a beautiful representation of the team's culture. It celebrates the people doing the work, the environment in which the work is made, and the process of the work as much as the output. “Go work on a book that tells the story of where the studio is at, at this moment in time. That stuff is like a little time capsule of who we were, how we think, and what we believed in, in this moment in time.”
Joe Gebbia, a co-founder at Airbnb, made a similar artifact about the team and about their shared vision. He explained to me that “At the beginning of the year, we did an exercise where I asked each member of the product team (engineers, designers, producers) to email me their favorite customer testimonial from…a guest or host on Airbnb that they connected with the most… We took all of those stories and bound them in a book and sent it back to the entire team. The book gave a lens into the types of things we could be creating together.”
These types of “free time” projects seem incidental and might appear to be a waste of time. But they serve three main purposes.
First, they offer contributors a way to temper feelings of resentment towards their project, as an alternative to quitting. Often, time heals wounds, and after completing a passion project like the ones described above, an employee can come back to work recharged.
Next, these types of projects signal a culture that celebrates creative exploration. They highlight that not all creative activities need to be productive and show the team that management recognizes and appreciates creativity as an end in itself. Even books and posters serve a tangible purpose, as they can be held up to the world as signals of the company's commitment to creativity.
Finally, the output of these projects is materially valuable. Vision work, both at a tactical level and at a broad blue-sky level, establishes and refines the trajectory of a team, and acts as a point of alignment for product road-mapping.
Takeaway: To help your team remain inspired, dedicate time to alternative projects, and treat them as important as “main” projects, in order.
