Exploration Time

A Brief History Lesson

It is the year 600 BC and you are in Greece. You are tasked with building a temple that is made of heavy stacked blocks. Your predecessors, the Egyptians, have efficiently stacked blocks for centuries by pushing the blocks up inclined planes—but you will do better! You will calculate the most efficient incline angle, put your workers on a strict diet and exercise plan, and grease the blocks to reduce friction! Or… you could build a crane

Philosophy

When solving hard problems, it is critical to occasionally abandon the obvious next steps and, instead, build a non-obvious solution that provides exponential leverage against the problem.

At Wunder, our mission is to save the world. We will achieve this mission by building software that introduces efficiencies into the clean energy market. As Wunder engineers, the single most important thing we can do to bend the CO2 curve downward is to build software which provides exponential leverage to our business. Yet, many software solutions that achieve that goal are not born solely out of product or business needs. The engineering team singularly owns the responsibility of building such solutions.

Exploration Time

The Wunder engineering team has a track record of turning business problems into highly-leverageable software. Examples include:

  • An accounting system which adapts to an ever-evolving flow-of-funds
  • A data auditing framework which is decoupled from the underlying data model
  • A generic framework for collecting, presenting, and validating data across complex relationships

All of these systems have provided immeasurable progress toward our mission but none are the obvious conclusion of product requirements. Historically, the success of these projects relied on individual engineers’ commitment to stepping outside the standard product cycle.

To ensure that delivering these sorts of solutions remains a core competency of our team, Wunder is committed to providing every engineer with time to dive deep into projects that do not fit neatly into the product roadmap. That time is called “Exploration Time”.

Goals

  • Provide a framework for undertaking engineering projects which fall outside the scope of the immediate product vision
  • Individual engineers play an active role in determining how technology is creatively leveraged to solve the broad set of problems we undertake at Wunder
  • Provide engineers with a clear path to increasing the scope and impact of their work

How to Utilize Exploration Time

  1. Identify an idea or project that you’d like to explore
  2. Present a project proposal to your team lead or at the engineering design meeting
  3. Presuming the team determines the proposal to be a sensible allocation of team resources, your team lead will work with you to find a time to undertake the project

Other Details

  • You should plan to work on Exploration Time projects for a minimum of two weeks per year. If a compelling project warrants more than two weeks, the timebox will be extended opportunistically.
  • A project proposal can take many forms (a written proposal, a code spike, a conversation). In any form, a proposal should seek to define the problem being solved, the goals of the project, and a rough execution plan.
  • The scope of projects that fall under Exploration Time is intentionally vague. If you’re not sure if your idea fits into this framework, talk to your team lead.
  • Inherent to Exploration Time projects is an increased risk of failure. This is okay! The goal of Exploration Time is to deliver value but if that doesn’t work out, we will have still learned a lot.
  • As engineers grow at Wunder it is expected that their scope of work and the leverage introduced by that work increases. In other words, work will increasingly take the form of Exploration Time projects. If you’re looking to grow as a technical contributor at Wunder, this is a great place to give some thought.