Making some wiggle room for engineering innovations

The company Intercom had a business-critical system, Nexus, that was built in-house and worked fine but demanded more resources to keep it running efficiently. The team tried to optimize and simplify the system, but finding time for such projects among other commitments was challenging. To address this, Intercom introduced a "wiggle week" - a dedicated space on the calendar where individual contributors could decide what they wanted to work on for that week with minimal planning. This allowed developers and designers to be creative and come up with their own ideas to improve the system. One engineer, William Tabi, used his wiggle week to rewrite Nexus in Go, which resulted in significant advantages such as faster deployment, improved performance, and major cost-savings. The project demonstrated the benefits of encouraging experimentation and innovation, and building the concept of innovation time into the culture allowed for unexpected rewards.

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