Dec 9, 2009
3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my!
3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment.
So is it worth it? 3M and Google point to products like Gmail and Post-it notes and say yes. They talk about it contributing to a culture of innovation and supporting a belief that ideas worth chasing can come from any level of the organization.
Every employee becomes product manager, project manager, production, marketing and sales for their idea. Programs like this don’t just encourage people to innovate, they require them to execute. By executing on their ideas employees get hands-on knowledge of the product lifecycle and gain a deeper appreciation for the contribution all departments make to a successful product.
Its a powerful way to build a product centric company and I hope Joachim and the rest of the Unity team will blog about the challenges and successes of their FAFF program as it evolves.
So far, it has been a great success for us. We’ve shipped several features that got made during a FAFF and then we decided to put the resources to get them to shippable status.
It’s also provided one good answer whenever our guys ask how they get their pet feature into the core product: “Make it as a FAFF and if it rocks, it’ll get in”.
the other nice part is that now I’m really looking forwards to the last day of the week – I can just sit down and do cool stuff without having to worry about the business implications or “how does this fit into our general timeline”.
Cheers,
Nicholas – Unity co-founder
Nicholas – Thanks for the feedback on your progress with FAFF. I can see how having the ability to say “Make it as a FAFF and if it rocks, it’ll get in” takes some of the tension out of the roadmap planning process.
We do this at Blurst too (we’re a Unity developer). We have no rules about relevance, either; sometimes an artist may do something in clay, or a programmer may try out a programming language we never expect to use. Or an artist may program and a programmer may make some art ;)
We have had very useful things fall out of it too. I made this in a Friday and we still use it in daily production: http://technology.blurst.com/unity-asset-server-web-browser/
Matthew – thanks for your input, looks like a nice asset page, having spent years on the Alienbrain team I am always interested to see how teams manage their assets and workflow.
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