Easy Innovations

4 min readJun 12, 2021

We have started running Free Code Fridays (FCF) at Easy Taxi for a couple of months. Innovative Companies like Google popularized this concept by encouraging developers to dedicate 20% of their working hours to create something new while improving and expanding their technical chops. When administered properly, FCF generates a win-win situation for the company and its employees.

Benefits for employees

Encourage learning: To stay competitive in the high-tech industry, one must constantly learn new technologies including programming languages, frameworks, and better ways of automating things. Startup often comes with a high pressured environment due to an aggressive roadmap delivery schedule and leaves little breathing room to explore better solutions instead of existing ones where less learning is required. FCF provides a playing ground where curious developers can survey what is out there and bring in technology that can improve the existing stack.
Motivate people: Motivated people are more productive and can build better software than unmotivated people working long hours under stress. FCF empowers developers by becoming artisans for code and creators of the new digital trend. Engineers can gain great satisfaction from fruitful activities and stay engaged with the company.
Foster collaboration: In a large IT organization, people are siloed functionally. There is a lack of communication amongst teams. Very often, the nature of FCF projects demand close collaboration and interaction between members of different functional teams. Quite often an API developer may want to dip their feet into mobile development and vice versa. This simple process encourages a holistic understanding of the software system.

Benefits for company

Product innovation: No one tells the artists what to create, their minds lead them. There is something magically inexplicable that happens on the cognitive level of human minds. An outsider is often wow’ed at the result of FCF activities, where product innovation that doesn’t come directly from product requirements defined in the roadmap.
Motivated employees: Salaries and perks are not long-lasting motivations. People seek for meaningful work. FCF acts as a collaborative dial that balances what company perceives to be useful with that of employees’.

Structure Within Freedom

There are some basic guidelines that are generally applicable to ensure a successful FCF.

Keep the scope small and realistic: FCF is just one day. The goal is to produce sufficient result that can illustrate the core idea. We want to avoid long-running projects over 3 weeks or sometimes months. People can lose interests in the same subject and it becomes less fun and attractive. If one can demonstrate the feasibility of the product and gain approval, then the FCF project graduates and enters the roadmap.
Sense of accomplishments: Go live. Have real users using it. It sounds simple but could be hard logistically, even after product buy-in.
Sufficient Preparation: Folks should formulate ideas a few days ahead of time and forming teams when applicable. Friday is short, don’t waste precious time negotiating who’s doing what on the day of.
Optional participation: It’s impractical to expect someone to come up with innovative ideas every Friday. It’s ok to just work on regular roadmap items, fix bugs, or get that desperately needed to refactor in.
Idea isolation: Business units may think this is a good time for developers to work on that-feature-they-really-wanted. Not so much. FCF is not about telling developers what to do but asking about what they want to do.

Here are some highlights of the features that have gone LIVE from the last 3 FCFs. I won’t bore you with the complete list here.