Innovation Week at Cyberhaven: Industry-Disrupting Achievements in Just Days

Cyberhaven is a tech company, which automatically means innovation by default. In addition to that, we are also a startup, equating to innovation on steroids. We have an open culture with ideas circulating freely and new solutions/improvements being introduced fairly quickly, and that also benefits creativity and originality resulting in productive problem-solving.

But is there a limit to nurturing the innovation culture? The sky is the limit!

So, our executive team, understanding the importance of giving even more space to people to develop their ideas championed this initiative.

The goal was to catalyse that innovation spark in team members and to boost ownership enthusiasm hoping to get some POCs in a short term and more excited and motivated people in a long run.

Innovation Week Structure and Execution

Thus, the innovation week. Everyone can (and is encouraged to) participate. You have only one requirement to meet, and here is the quote : “All sorts of ideas are welcome with just one condition - They should be, at the very least, loosely relevant to Cyberhaven.”

A person with an idea is supposed to determine what kind of competences are necessary for the successful implementation and “hire” a team if needed. Teams could be anything from one to five people, and in the end of the week the team submits a demo showcasing the results it achieved.

For a week all non customer-facing and not urgent meetings were canceled and teams received an opportunity to concentrate on their projects. Slack became unusually calm. Calendar as well. But a flair of enthusiasm and involvement was felt even though people are dispersed in space and time(zones).

Context

To understand the context a bit, at Cyberhaven we work on protecting companies’ data from leaks and insider risks. In our DDR (Data Detection and Response) platform we use a novel data lineage technology to trace and secure the data. This approach is a game-changer on its own, because it allows for much more visibility into the origin and the history of the file, thus providing much more context about security risk in case of possible data exfiltration. Consequently, more context allows to respect user’s privacy and reduce analysts’ fatigue by minimising amount of false positive leak alerts.

Project Outcomes

The ideas were diverse and spanned across the following most popular categories:

• Data Security and Document Management
• Permissions Management
• User Interaction and Experience
• Linking

The majority of submitted projects do have potential to be converted into real value-bringing features. What is even better is that some of the projects (if brought to the production stage) are very likely to redefine CISOs’ expectations from data protection and insider risk prevention tools.

Here is the opinion of the project outcomes from the executive team member (Sr. Director of Engineering): “Output of the innovation week was quite good. We got 4-5 ideas which we can include in the immediate roadmap. But even more important than that is the fact that the entire R&D team felt energised and empowered. It fostered collaborations across people in different areas which otherwise would not have happened”.

Highlights

Here is more detail on how the teams organized themselves and went about bringing their idea to life.

Dima, Team Lead and Full-Stack Genius in a team of five people:

We spent about one day figuring out what we wanted to do, how it was supposed to work, and how much of our ideas could actually be done. As a result, we iterated from a super ambitious idea to a very minimal plan. In two days we wrote most of the code (which we had written quite a lot).  We then spent another two days assembling everything together and doing troubleshooting, followed by some additional bug fixing.

Bohdan, Emotional Support Backend Developer in a team of four people:

We learned that combining an impactful idea, some cautious pessimism about our capabilities (including the capability to write bugless code), plus some laziness yields a reasonable scope that can be done by 4 people in one week. We did also gather a good team. I was not able to avoid meetings during this innovation week. In fact, my meeting time increased. My usual time in meetings is 14 hours. For this week it increased to 17.3 hours! Still, it didn’t stop us from doing what we planned.

Anna, Team Lead and QA in a team of two people:

Innovation week has been a very cool experience, because it allowed for trying on the roles of a PM and a designer. Creating a feature from the initial concept felt like a child birth 🙂. A very moving experience. I was so fond of this feature. Wanting to show it off everywhere and make sure everyone knows how absolutely wonderful it is! 😀

Working in a small team where everyone understands how things should work allows the process to move much faster. There is no bureaucracy. No endless approvals. No drawn-out debates over button colours or wording.

Most importantly; it was fun! A small competition like this one gives a lot of drive and motivation!

Insightful Takeaways

Flavius, Endpoint Security Developer in a team of five people:

Innovation week showed that given the right framework many of us can contribute more to the company's direction and development. It provided a great structure for generating meaningful ideas.

Darko, Frontend Developer in a team of four people:

Our Innovation Week project was a showcase of several concepts I believe are crucial for a great project.

Scope early and scope well - we’ve defined the scope of our project very early, by defining what can be considered an MVP, and possible improvements. This allowed us to have ambitious, but yet quite reachable goals, that we could meet without overstretching. In the end, that resulted in a finished and fairly polished project which was done with zero tension.

Put competent people with a shared passion together and watch the magic happen - for a successful project with such a short timeframe, a good team should consist of:

• People that are capable and have expertise in areas that are relevant to the project
• Owners - engineers that have a strong sense of ownership and pride in what they do
• Folks that are able to manage their time efficiently - during our project we were mature enough to stick with our initial scope even when we managed to implement the initial prototype extremely quickly. Having the common sense to understand that we’ll definitely find issues that need to be polished and that we have to plan for that as well prevented us from falling into the “just another feature” trap, and in the end made the scope just right.

Work on something that excites you - I believe everyone was excited about solving the problem we were tackling. I remember the blank stares from my (very non-technical) wife when I tried my best to explain what we were doing with utmost enthusiasm 😅

My personal takeaway (AI Engineer in a team of four people):

Participating in the initiative was a striking realisation about how much can be accomplished by a small team in just days if certain conditions are met:

• A personal interest in the functionality to be implemented
• Having right people in the room, but not too many people
• A well formed team that:
  • includes an exhaustive set of competencies within the smallest number of individuals possible. Have right people in the room. But don’t have too many people in the room
  • work well together. It helped to have experience working/cooperating with each member of my team separately before having the chance to be a part of one team. Prior experience working together was enough to infer that working together would work.
• A well defined end goal that allows for chunking and iterating the tasks to be done
  • well defined list of tools and components we must have to make it work
  • at least a bit of prior experience working on the component in question
  • some prior experience of setting the needed infrastructure
  • a couple of optional nice-to-have ”side quests” sitting there in case we have time for them
• A structured process where TBD items are discussed in the morning and then followed up in the evening.
  • towards the end of the week, multiple sync ups per day to follow bug-fixing, demo preparation, final touches, last-minute improvements.

With all these elements in place, we had a working base prototype by Wednesday. Two additional days were spent to make it usable, comprehensive, and reach the MVP stage.

Conclusions

Benefits and impact of innovation week adoption are priceless. The results are far more promising than expected. Numerous new horizons were opened up. We expect even more long-term positive impact on the team, on the product, and on the industry.

In the foreseeable future we believe this initiative will result in Cyberhaven raising the bar for insider risk management and data protection products, advancing the state of the art and allowing CISOs to sleep better … while making Cyberhaven’s competitors worry.

P.S. When the results were announced, I was in the air over Atlantic flying to DefCon. And when I landed I discovered it’s our team who won! (But it’s not the reason I’m writing this: the draft of this article was started way before :D).

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