Emilie Lessard, a super talented technologist, is back in Québec after three years at FACEBOOK. She made quite an impact at our CONTINUUM 2019 event!

Emilie shared several business philosophies with us. The one topic that got to me was the importance of having an IMPACT.

At FACEBOOK, teams are highly autonomous. To help developers select and measure their contributions, managers ask that they continuously consider the impact they are having. They have to LIKELY create value for the company, the products, and ultimately for the social media users.

Three cultural company traits support HAVING AN IMPACT mindset:

• Obsessively removing friction. Exploring an idea must be painless.

• Failure is a possible outcome. Management won't penalize you if your idea turns out to be worthless.

• You work on experiments. To move to the next MVP milestone, data-driven KPIs must support your initial intuition.

Once again, we see innovation leaders invert their corporate structures. Ideas and initiatives bubble up, while upper-echelons provide the necessary information and support for teams to act on them.

You have bright people willing to help the business. Let them do it instead of telling them what to do.

Kudos to Emilie for her successes, and thank you for sharing with us.