Before I get into details I want to start with my early thoughts. I’d only heard about viesure’s innovative approach during the hiring process. At first, I was a bit skeptical, since ‘innovation’ has become an overused buzzword in our industry.
At viesure that is definitely not the case, in my first 4 weeks I’ve already participated in three ideation workshops and two multiday innovation work groups. In the ideation sessions I was teamed up with people from different roles from various development teams.

Inside an Ideation Workshop

How does it work? First we’ve received an introduction to a certain topic or a current challenge by an expert or stakeholder. After the introduction we’ve used various workshop methods to discover as many insights as possible on the selected topic without any constraints. Some of the methods we used are based on Google Ventures best practices for innovation or the “Gamestorming” workshop concepts from Dave Gray, for example:

• empathy map (to connect with the customers)
• brainwriting (building up on each others ideas)
• How might we… (rephrase problems into challenges)
• … many more, changing depending on the topic, every session is different!

My sketch notes during one of the sessions

Once we’ve generated enough bold and out-of-the-box ideas we switched our mindset back to the real world and map our ideas to our business constraints. We challenged our ideas and gave our best to generate a couple of possible candidates that might resolve the initial problem. At the end, we created a brief concept in the form of an idea napkin. Those short summaries are then further evaluated after the workshop. And that’s a wrap for the ideation session!

From the idea to the topic work group

When one of the ideas is selected for further analysis by our innovation team we form a new multidisciplinary group of people for the topic work group. Some people have worked with the topic before and some come in with a fresh view. We get up to three days to reevaluate the idea and see if we can build an innovative product that fits our current or yet unknown challenges. During those days we interview stakeholders, industry experts and key decision makers. We research the market and map possible customer journeys and the business flow. We use best practices tools like a value proposition canvas or a business model canvas to visualize the product and services. Once we are done, the idea is pitched to our management team and we discuss the next steps.

Balancing innovation and delivery

Besides the challenging ideation and topic team sessions I was onboarded to the main products and two scrum development teams whom I will be working with. It’s definitely an interesting challenge to balance the regular product development efforts with the innovation sessions.  Both are equally important at viesure, we have the mission to deliver great products and to innovate for the future.

The scrum master’s role in this journey

As a participant my main objective was to contribute and be a provider of meaningful value like everyone else in the group. With experience in the scrum master and agile team coach role I’ve supported the assigned facilitator with ideas and reflections on the process and methods being used. Additionally, I challenged the participants with thought provoking questions, reframing exercises and other typical team coaching activities during the sessions to achieve the best possible results.

How does this fit the scrum framework?

Looking back at my first month, I realize that what I’ve experienced isn’t just onboarding into the innovation lifecycle, it’s a glimpse into how flexible and people centered the scrum master role can be here. At viesure, it’s not about following a fixed playbook like scrum and more about what truly helps the team succeed. My colleague Nadezda wrote about this in her blog post, describing why the team at viesure often go beyond “scrum” and instead focus on culture, collaboration and innovation.

Looking ahead

I have already added my mark to the viesure team tree, each colored dot is a fingerprint from one of us, with their name next to it. As the tree grows, so do our innovation projects and ideas while we are still delivering high-quality and state of the art products.
I can’t wait to see what the future at viesure brings!