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In the summer of 2020, I took on a role as an innovation consultant for a 500-employee media company. We wanted to boost efficiency and innovation across the board. I sat down regularly with folks from all departments—marketing, content production, partnerships, SEO—you name it.
They all had one thing in common: they were super ambitious.
But five weeks in, I realized these ambitious teams were getting demoralized by having their theories stuck as theories. They felt powerless, and their work seemed never-ending. The setup at this firm overwhelmed the IT team, with a general thought that this team was the only one who could invent things with technology. Well, the IT team were the masters.
In our weekly meetings, I started to realize that these ambitious teams were pretending to be busy with planning, but they were mostly just waiting on IT to implement their business ideas. And guess what? None of these ideas ever saw the light.
My team and I had to switch the conversation to the IT department. We had hands-on meetings to understand why things were taking forever. Coming from a coding background, I couldn't blame them. Their backlog had hundreds of tasks—I'm not kidding.
When I asked them how we could solve this, their main suggestion was to scale up their team to handle more work. But when I went back to my team, shared the backlog, and laid it all out in front of us, it was clear that hiring more tech people wouldn't unblock this mess. It was an infinite backlog.
My technical intuition kicked in. Why should we wait for IT? I could set up whatever tools we needed and make them available within my team to see what could come out of it. I was more technical than the average employee, and my team was a blend of technical and non-technical people. So, our next idea was to run some experiments by installing powerful tools that enabled my team to design and implement ideas without relying on IT.
It was a fun experiment, and it's where this book and all the work at Activepieces came from.
At most large companies, IT is a bottleneck. Overlooking this fact will only inflate stagnation. In the next chapters, we'll discuss what it takes to unblock these ambitious teams, and you'll see how you can experience this firsthand at your company as well.