Datadog Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation, and how have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

My team is building large language model-powered autonomous agents, so innovation is key in such a new and evolving space. Our last team summit was mostly a multi-day hackathon with some out-of-the-box projects as well as some that have become a reality.

I think what’s more important than these events is building innovation into our regular workflow. Our team is very self-directed, and most improvements to our agent come from bottom-up proposals from individual engineers. We’re each thinking critically about changes to make and experiments to run, and we’re empowered to implement them. A few formal and informal practices help this work for us. We have strong ad-hoc communication, which is important with all the self-directed work. Our planning process encourages proposals of new ideas for next areas of work. We also have a shared goal and system for measuring whether we’re progressing to help ensure that innovations are ultimately useful.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

Innovative proposals from different engineers on our team have completely shaped the way our software works now. Examples of this include both small features and fundamental aspects of our agent’s architecture. A key information retrieval phase was originally proposed and implemented by an engineer who had the idea, and it’s now one of the best performing aspects of our agent. More recently other engineers have implemented a way to chain steps of reasoning together to produce more accurate findings. I don’t think it would be possible to build the type of software that we’re working on without a heavy focus on fostering innovation.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

The innovative nature of the work and the team’s culture definitely go hand in hand. Getting lunch with the team frequently turns into a brainstorm about ideas to try. These can range from pragmatic and immediately implemented to off-the-wall moonshots. I have a lot of fun working in this type of environment, and I think it brings the whole team closer together, too.