Background
LinkedIn is a business and employment oriented web based social networking service. You can also download the app on your mobile device. It is primarily used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their professional profile. In 2016, Microsoft acquired Linkedin. Even after the acquisition, Microsoft allows Linkedin to operate as if they were an independent company. They have around 500 million members worldwide. LinkedIn website allows users (Employees and employers) to create professional profiles. Employee profiles consist of a describing their work experience, education, volunteering experience and training, skills, and a personal photo option. The site also enables members to connect with each other as they would on other social media networking sites. Members can invite anyone, whether a member or not a member, to become a connection. Their headquarters are in Sunnyvale, CA but has office around the world. Their revenue is about $3 billion dollars and derives from 4 business units: Talent Solutions, Marketing Solution, Premium Subscriptions, and Learning Solutions. As some of the other Silicon Valley companies believe in, Linkedin also believe that innovation happens on every team level. One person or team should not be responsible for innovating products and processes. Everyone at the company should be involved from ground level to c-level.
Innovation
Input
LinkedIn believes that competition enforces innovation. They appreciate the cluster in Northern California that pushes them to innovate. LinkedIn does not have a team designated specifically for innovation. At LinkedIn every team should be innovative. They focus on small deliverables that each employee is trying to reach. There are encouraged to allocate time towards completing personal, team, and company OKR. LinkedIn employees receive one friday a month off to do whatever they want. LinkedIn is open to innovation and has no problem using all resources to being a project. Innovative ideas are given authorization when they are highly researched and aligned with the ultimate goals and mission of LinkedIn. LinkedIn tries to “Do it right the first time”
Process
They do not have a dedicated team at Linkedin for Innovation. They believe that every team should do it. If they see value related to what the company is working on, they will allocate resources. Their process is agile. They believe in incremental process and making continuous improvements.
LinkedIn likes to be a socially connected company. With its work culture being the most important; shows that you are impacting the company and collaborating with other companies.
It is encouraged for teams to collaborate and share ideas with one another and even discuss issues in a current project that someone might be dealing with, with the intention of receiving help or someone’s input from an outside member.
LinkedIn keeps projects running for years to make it well established; they are always testing their projects and improving on it, using tools for automated testing
LinkedIn´s strategy to measure success is to “always measure”. In other words, it is important to always be able to measure a whole or parts of projects in order to evaluate and predict the result of it. Therefore, LinkedIn has created a success-matrix that is implemented closely from the early stage of each project to have measurement through the whole process from start to finish.
However, there are certain key measurements that LinkedIn looks at when measuring success of a project. They measures of success are based on:
- Periodic evaluation (decided checkpoints to measure against the success-matrix)
- Evaluate the project with goals and benefits of the company – check for alignment and value for the company
- Code checks through several stages in order to assure the implementation of new code will work and create a better experience for its users – the code check also involved quality check of the product or service through various testing
Output
The main focus of LinkedIn when deciding on projects and its success is to always paint the big picture and team will club to achieve that through each project – no matter its focus. LinkedIn focuses a lot on people, both customers and users. Therefore, it is always to inform everybody involved in a project what they are striving for to achieve the goal of creating a successful project or service. Therefore, these metrics are set up to spend more time and do each project right rather than just get things done.
The decision to exit a project if successful vs failed should come from, if possible, the people closest to the product. Meaning, the team should be able to take the first action by evaluating a project against its metrics. If a project has a greater impact on strategic goals, the decision could be made by product manager or higher executives. However, in most part and the goal of each project is that all decisions should come from the people closest to the ground. In other words, the closest to the product or service that are being produced.
