In many companies, a requirement is that developers work 5 days a week on the product, and to implement features that Product Manager says they need to be implemented.
This approach leads to lower satisfaction and higher turnover. People want to feel empowered, instead of just being a cog in the machine.
How does experimentation time helps prevent this?
There are multiple benefits for both, the company and the developers:
1. Experimentation allows developers to explore new technologies and gain new knowledge.
This directly improves the productivity of that developer.
Also, the tech stack the company is usually working with does not change, which can feel stale after some time. Allowing time to explore gives developers novelty and satisfaction.
2. During experimentation time, a developer can handle some technical debt, or just a piece of code that needs to be improved.
Doing these improvements helps reduce the friction for the features the team is actively working on, and reduce stress on the developers.
3. Experimentation time draws people from other departments to come forward and voice their pains and ideas.
Then, engineers try to automate a problem, or create a prototype of a feature.
This leads to increased collaboration and feeling of belonging inside the company, and stops the internal silos from being created.
In some cases, the developer does not know exactly what to work on.
Then, the developer would simply continue working on the existing work.
What have I not seen? Developers wasting time.
Fun fact: Gmail started through the Google’s 20%-time initiative, where developers have 20% time free to explore projects of personal interest.