🖤 Open Works #038 How To Build An Innovation Engine

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💰️ Edition 36: How To Think About Executive Compensation - a mental model and stage by stage guide to approach it.

🔋 Edition 35: How to Manage Change Fatigue - diagnostic, approach and framework for dealing with a real threat.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

Products need constant iteration.

Your people product is no different.

But innovation isn’t just about churning out endless ideas (that is exhausting!). It’s about building a repeatable engine that consistently surfaces, tests, and scales what actually works.

Innovation = input + testing + feedback.

But before you build the engine, make sure it’s pointed at the right problem. Align it with what your company stage actually needs.

The Real Problem

“Innovate more” is often thrown at People teams without any clarity on what that innovation is for.

And without that context, you can end up spinning:

👉 testing a flashy new onboarding flow when what you really need is to fix payroll
👉 launching a mentorship pilot when what your exec team wants is cost-per-hire savings
👉 adding more stuff when your team needs better basics

Before you build a system for innovation, figure out what kind of innovation matters right now.

JooBee to the rescue with a super handy mental model (i think):

So…

• If you’re in RUN, innovation focus = eliminating pain points + building reliability

• If you’re in DRIVE, innovation focus = aligning people processes to business goals

• If you’re in GROW, innovation focus = custom solutions that unlock performance

• If you’re in SCALE, innovation focus = big bets and 10x plays

⚠️ Innovation without this context leads to noise. With it, you start solving the right problems at the right time.

So... How Do You Actually Build a Repeatable Innovation Engine?

You need three ingredients:

1. Input → ideas, signals, frustrations

2. Testing → fast, low-stakes experiments

3. Feedback → learning loops and metrics

🧠 Build the System, Not Just the Idea

Here’s a simple innovation loop you can run monthly:

1. Live Pain Tracker

   • Slack form or Google Form or Miro board. Anyone can log friction points across people experience.

   • Categorise monthly. Prioritise by frequency + impact.

2. Monthly Innovation Sprint

   • Pick a theme (onboarding, feedback, L&D, etc.)

   • Assign an owner. 2 weeks to test one change.

   • Low stakes. High learning.

3. Steal & Adapt Time

   • Every quarter, go to your community, learn something new that someone else is trying...

   • Force-fit one into a test.

4. Test & Kill Quickly

   • If it works, scale it. If it doesn’t, kill it fast and capture what you learned.

💡Some of my favourite but simplest success metrics:
 - # of experiments/month
 - Time from idea → live test
 - % of experiments that scale

🛠 Remix Catalogue: Practices Worth Poaching

Got a basic loop in place and looking for ideas? I love borrowing from other disciplines here. Examples from some of my favourite below:

🔁 From Lean Startup & Agile

♻️ From Continuous Improvement / Kaizen

🎨 From Design Thinking & Innovation

Next Steps

• Pick next month’s innovation sprint theme + assign an owner.

• Run a “steal and adapt” session. What’s one practice from outside you can trial?

• Track your innovation/experiment backlog like a product team. If you don’t know how, go ask them.

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 Lean UX Canvas (Miro template)

📔 Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya

📔 Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres

📔 IDEO Design Kit: Methods

📔 Stanford Design Thinking Playbook

📔 Google Ventures Design Sprint

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People?!

Well my friend, now you do.

👉️ Adam wrote words about this here. 

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech discounts and some other free stuff.

Early bird discount of 25% off for year 1. If that sounds fun, get your name on the list here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂