360Learning Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation, and how have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

We do a hackathon every year, which allows everyone to try doing things they wouldn’t be doing otherwise. But as architects, we also have to keep up to date on the tech world, so we read a lot, go to conferences and meetups and create proofs of concept. We do POCs regularly to try out new technologies, and we listen to the pains and the challenges that the developers have; they push us to see what there is outside of our little bubble that could help them.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

The easy answer is OpenAI. When ChatGPT launched, we were already building generative AI functionalities, but with our own infrastructure. It was working, but slowly and with limited quality. As soon as we saw what ChatGPT could do and the cost of the API, we did a POC to integrate it in our platform, and the result was much faster, better quality and cheaper, and it opened up dozens of new possibilities. 

We also integrated asynchronous processing in our monolith. That idea came from hearing the developers complaining about bugs where large processing like video conversion took tens of minutes and would block the servers from doing anything else. They were empty-handed when confronted with the consequences of that code: slowness, bugs and clients complains. We deployed a state-of-the-art pipeline of queues and buses, which solved almost all issues on that part.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

We are engineers, and the heart of the job is to solve complex problems. Most of us are quickly tired of solving the same problems with the same tools. We want to see new stuff, learn new technologies and discover new problems to solve. By pushing for innovation, we solved old problems that were pestering us for so long that we thought they would always be there, and we introduced ourselves to complete new domains like AI, data and DevOps. I can’t see how that wouldn’t excite you!