In the engineering department of a company that relies on its technology for all aspects of its product offerings, there is a consistent need for us to both be improving upon our established products and processes as well as to be looking into the future to take our technology to the next level. Undeniably the engine of ZoomInfo is our technology and the innovations and improvements we develop now will be what propels us into the future. The pressure is on our talented engineers to not only complete their projects on time, but to be constantly focused on what they can do to improve and hopefully achieve the ultimate philosophical goal of our development, making the unknown known.
Amid the day to day tasks and resulting pressure to deliver that faces our engineering team, the issue that remains is one of keeping the department focused on the execution of current projects and yet fostering creativity at the same time. Collectively we realized there was a need for us to take a few days to sit down as a group to clear our heads and discuss what we can do as a team to move us forward. From this need, IdeaFest was born.
IdeaFest is a two day time-out from work where we allow ourselves to think outside the box and brainstorm improvements to ZoomInfo offerings. Two objectives were first established:
- How do the ideas we come up with meet the corporate business challenge- how can we improve on our knowledge of our customers and how they use the system?
- From what other publicly available web sources not currently utilized by us can we gain more fresh information to grow the total number of complete business records in our database?
We started by brainstorming our ideas and creating a list of possibilities. From there, we formed small groups and dove into developing the ideas that appealed to us into actual prototypes of changes we could make to our technology. It showed us that even in a relatively short amount of time we could come up with projects that could have a real effect on our ROI.
After all was said and done, there were many great ideas put forth by our team. We evaluated the relative importance and feasibility of each idea and created a backlog to draw from. I’m happy to report that many of the ideas we came up with are currently in the pipeline and in the future will be used to improve the overall ZoomInfo user experience.
The value of taking time to hold an IdeaFest goes beyond just the innovations to our products and technology- it allows for collaboration and teamwork as well as giving our engineering team a stake in the planning and creativity in developing our core. Everyone coming together to offer their insights into where we are going technologically takes us to new places we very well may not have gone – not just as a department but as well as the company as a whole.
Eugenia Gillan is ZoomInfo’s VP of Engineering. In her free time she is also an accomplished swimming coach.
