The Innovation Formula

CHAPTER 2 AUTONOMY Should you loosen the reins?

Imagine you work as a developer for Etsy. In case you haven't heard of Etsy, it is a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. It has 1.5 million sellers, almost 22 million active buyers, and in 2014 it had gross merchandise sales of almost $2 billion. So you could say it's doing quite well.

Now let's just say you happen to notice a problem with the Etsy website, or perhaps you think of a way it could be improved. At most organisations you would probably tell your manager about the problem, who would probably tell his or her manager, and after waiting a few weeks you might then get approval to make your desired change. In short, you have very limited ability to make changes you believe are important.

At Etsy it's a completely different story. When I met up with Chad Dickerson, Etsy's CEO and chairman, in their Brooklyn offices in New York, he told me that anyone in the team can make a change to the Etsy website whenever they see a need. (Etsy.com had over 40 million unique views per month when we spoke; at the time of writing it has around 60 million.)

‘We do something on the engineering team called continuous deployment', explains Dickerson. ‘That's a fancy way of saying that we've given every software developer, every product manager the ability to change the site at any time. Back in 2009 when we started this approach, not many companies were doing this. Typically, ...