Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This workflow that you described are ideas that are coming from customers and have been picked up and identified by the product organization. Do you have any kind of internal innovation or intrapreneurship program that nurtures grassroots intrapreneurship within the organization?

Steven Aldrich: We don’t have a separate team. We have a framework that we’ve taught everybody around horizon-thinking. This is a concept that, I think, McKinsey had originally come up with where you have existing businesses who are paying the bills. They’re called horizon one businesses. You have your growth businesses where things are growing faster than the overall portfolio.

In a company like GoDaddy, we have many products, some of which are growing quite fast. Those get additional resources. Then we have these experiments for the future or horizon three businesses. We are conscious about the resourcing across those three horizons. Individuals at each horizon are expected to innovate so we don’t make it someone’s day job to be the innovation person or the intrapreneur, but we expect that when we have a horizon three idea, we then have a set of people who have been identified as advisors and coaches for this horizon three team.

We’ll meet once a month and we’ll continue to look at the learnings about the customer needs in the previous month. The team will be available for help and consultation in between those monthly sessions. The goal at the end of each session is to decide if we want to continue to explore or did we learn enough to determine that this is not as big an opportunity as we thought.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I’m trying to understand a bit is, how does the broader workforce get to play in this innovation framework. Let me elaborate a little bit on why I’m going there. We are working with some corporate partners where they want the whole organization to, at least, have an opportunity to participate in innovation.

Part of it is driven by the fact that today, the word innovation and entrepreneurship are so catchy and so pervasive in the corporate societies that part of the job attractiveness is dependent on how much people can participate in these kinds of innovation, incubation, or intrapreneurship types of programs. What I’m hearing is they want to give opportunities to everybody to apply themselves in that direction. If everybody is submitting ideas, then you need a process and a framework to collect those ideas and vet those ideas.

Which ones get developed further? Which ones get resources? Is there something like that going on within your organization or is it more structured where dedicated organizations are doing that?

Steven Aldrich: We have no dedicated organization for that. Inside of companies, everyone’s day job is to figure out how to apply innovative thinking to make the current product better or think of a way to create something new. Going back to the ideas that come through, anyone can propose an idea. Anyone can raise their hand and say, “I want to work on one of the horizon three ideas.” Generally, what we find is there are lots of folks who are excited about what they’re doing day in and day out. The concept of “it’s someone else’s job to innovate” is a counter to our values.

Sramana Mitra: I agree with that. I’m very much of the opinion that dedicated innovation teams is not where all the domain knowledge and the customer knowledge rests. The customer and domain knowledge are pervasive inside the organization. You have to have processes to be able to extract those ideas and bring them through a process such that you can evaluate them whether they deserve further attention or not.

Steven Aldrich: Whenever an engineer has an idea, we have hackathons where the engineers can come, pitch, and build prototypes on almost a monthly basis. Then we have some larger virtual hackathons that are company-wide and a couple of in-person hackathons. We see very interesting ideas coming out of those. Many times, those ideas are extensions of what we do today. Those are pushed back into one of the product teams to vet and put on the roadmap.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy
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