Hello out there!

In this, my first blog post, I'd like to tell you about a program we instituted in xMatters engineering this year called 5-5-5 days. 

Some background: our engineers are very creative - you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't have one pet project or another on the go.  However, we also set aggressive deadlines and usually don't have much time left to explore our interesting ideas as much as we'd like.  The intention of 5-5-5 day is to make space for this innovation and creativity and let engineers let out their inner mad scientist.  Ok so why is it called 5-5-5 day?

• It happens every 5th of the month or thereabouts.
• It amounts to approximately 5% of an engineer's working life.
• On the morning following, each engineer has 5 minutes to demo their creation.

The idea here is not new; Google 20% time is a famous example, and one can even trace the concept back to much earlier days at 3M .  However we're not ashamed to copy a good idea.  We have now completed seven 5-5-5 days and in my opinion the results have been fantastic.  In future blog posts I'll be profiling some of the 5-5-5 projects that have made it to production, and others that are just too cool not to show off.