Upscale Innovation Week

Events like this are often referred to as ‘Down tools week’ or ‘Hack week’, we chose ‘Innovation Week’ because we wanted to appeal to the entire company, so that everyone felt welcome, regardless of their background or experience.

We are big believers in being customer-centric, thoughtful, and value-first. So we thought what better way to encourage this than having our teams come together and innovate around these values and create a foundation for creativity and craft.

Our Innovation Week takes place over three days of a normal working week. It's a chance to step away from our day-to-day tasks to focus solely on innovation. Team members are encouraged to organise into groups to focus on an idea or project of their choice. There is no fixed rule on what to work on but the general overarching theme is: 'helping us be more efficient, organised, and/or flexible'. Projects can range from a new product for monday.com, Atlassian or Slack, to a new tool or process that improves how we work internally or build better apps in the future.

This week is about showing everyone that they have an important role to play in our mission, whether you work in Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, or User Research & UX. The more diverse the teams, roles, and results, the better.

While it would be fabulous to have three or four app ideas to go ahead with and commercialise, it's not always the aim. We welcome projects that help bring a positive change to how we do things day-to-day, that don’t have to involve writing a single line of code.

Overall, Innovation Week is all about giving us the freedom to break from the norm, be innovative and have fun with our colleagues. What's not to love about that?

Our first Innovation Week was particularly special and memorable. The reason for this is we launched Upscale on 29 February; one might say taking a leap into new beginnings. Our mission? 'To craft lovable apps that upscale the value and experience of everyday platforms,' we also want to achieve this with a sense of enjoyment, both for us and for customers. Holding our first Innovation week, two weeks after our launch was a fantastic way to kickstart our journey to achieve the former, and hopefully, the results of which will help us deliver the latter.

Innovation is at the core of what we do and we encourage it within our product teams at all times. But the best ideas come from a diversity of perspectives; that's why we want to give everyone in our company the opportunity to pitch a solution to a problem that they have seen or experienced. Most importantly, we want to encourage our people to work outside their teams, to get to know each other better, and to come up with great ideas together. A week dedicated to innovation makes that possible.

We have all experienced different hack days and similar events, ranging from our own Adaptavist Group Hackday to in-person events such as the start-up weekend.

These types of events are usually ring-fenced between 24 and 48 hours, but we decided three days would be the ideal length of time for our team to explore a problem and come up with ideas for solutions without feeling rushed or pressured.

To get a head start on things, we encouraged people to form teams in the week leading up to the event. After a simple kick-off meeting on Monday, the event was off and running. Then three days of focused work and of course fun culiminated in five-minute presentations and demos on the Thursday. All of which were incredible given the short timeframe.

In short, most definitely and even more than we hoped. To quote our General Manager, Jari Worsley:

From a commercial perspective, the week has given us plenty to think about and consider in terms of the direction we should take with some of the great ideas people came up with.

We couldn't be more proud and excited with our teams' efforts. Stay tuned to hear about some of the projects coming to fruition in the coming months. Even if we have only one make it to an app marketplace near you, that's more than a good enough reason to continue to do these going forward.

Our teams are diverse in their location, roles, and backgrounds, so seeing it all come together and people feeling comfortable to collaborate, share, and help each other is really what these initiatives are all about. We hope to have many more of these events at Upscale in the future, and to make them a core part of our culture and DNA.

These events wouldn't be anything without the people who helped organise and put it together, and of course those who got stuck in and make the magic happen. We all have a lot of work to do so it can be hard to set that aside and focus on new ideas and projects but it really made a difference to everyone who got involved. We are very grateful for everyone's willingness to participate in this event and make it such a success. Stay tuned for more to come in the future!