Flourish Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
A major part of our engineering interview process includes a hackathon-style project, where the prospective candidate collaborates on a short project for a day with the panel of interviewers from the Flourish team. This is an opportunity for all participants to try out technologies or patterns that we may have been evaluating or even things that the team has read about in industry chatter, blogs or publications. Past examples include technology like WebSockets or command-line-interface packages that can inform internal tooling. The team has even tried out not-currently-used browser features or frontend frameworks or newer React versions or related client-side UI libraries (examples might include AGGrid or Tailwind). Spinning up new and interesting ideas in this context helps us gain insight on evolving technology in a lower-stakes environment, while giving the candidate a chance to experience our collaborative working style and culture.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
Flourish engineering strives to instill a sense of ownership in the engineer’s code and technology. We often use a mantra that can be summarized as “the designs and business specifications will never tell the whole story of what should be implemented in code” as a reminder that the engineers can and should think about how best to shepherd their technology into the future. 

This strategic thinking is an important and necessary part of how we foster and develop new ideas over time while meeting the needs to keep the business moving forward. We’ve seen this in several areas; we have a quality assurance automation team that has built full-featured infrastructure and tooling to help us both run and analyze automated tests and test data over time. We’ve also seen systems that we built in prior years evolve as our user base and our product needs have scaled to incorporate more patterns like relationship-based access control using technologies like SpiceDB. These are driven by engineers understanding the context of what is prevalent in the industry and having the agency to work to improve the technology that they own.