Research

  by Duncan Grisby | 17 Apr 2007 | Permalink | Software, Software Engineering

Before co-founding Tideway, I worked at a commercial research lab in Cambridge. The lab started life as Olivetti Research Limited, commonly known as ORL. Later on, it became the Olivetti and Oracle Research Lab (still ORL, just with an invisible second O), and a while after that, it became AT&T Laboratories Cambridge. In April 2002, AT&T closed the lab as part of worldwide research cuts, casting me out into the real world (and into the clutches of a certain Richard Muirhead).

Research labs are a long-term investment — a company like Tideway has to turn a profit on its activities far more rapidly, and more reliably on each thing it develops. That means we have to focus much more on building products that our customers want right now, rather than on ideas that might one day be of interest to someone. On the other hand, as a product company, we can’t just concentrate on the problems our customers currently know they have. If we do, our competition will come up with some great ideas that neither we nor our customers thought of, and then we’ll be in trouble.

So, how can a company like Tideway manage to come up with new ideas and try out new things, while still concentrating on building products that sell on a shorter-term basis? Google is famous for “Google Fridays”, in which all developers can spend 20% of their time doing their own projects. Google is also famous for having copious quantities of money, so they can afford such extravagances. At Tideway we can’t dedicate that much time to research, but we do have a personal projects scheme where anyone can submit ideas for small projects. If the projects sound worthwhile and there is time in the schedules, the people with the ideas can work on their projects. The scheme works pretty well, and we’ve had some good ideas come out of it, quite a few of which have ended up as product features.

However, in the time since we started it, the personal projects scheme hasn’t had as many submissions as I would have hoped. I don’t think that’s because we don’t have clever enough people — we certainly do. I think the main reason is that to have good ideas, you have to be relaxed and have time to think occasionally. All too often, everyone is so busy working on all the things that have to get done that all the good ideas that might have emerged are stifled before they are born. Of course, that’s not unusual for a startup company, but I think it’s important that as Tideway grows, we remember to give just enough breathing space to our talented developers that they can think once in a while. That way, they’ll be happier, and so will our product managers when they hear about all the great ideas we’ve had. And then our customers will be happy too when they realise they can buy solutions to problems they never realised they had.