Celonis Innovation, Technology & Agility

Tell us about a recent product your team launched. How does it drive Celonis’ mission forward?

One recent product launch I had the opportunity to work on was the release of our new Studio experience. With the support of an incredible team of “Celonauts,” we successfully introduced a completely redesigned Studio aimed at delivering a more joyful user experience for our customers. 

Successfully delivering our new Studio experience to our customers is a project that’s deeply intertwined with Celonis’ mission to enable customers to take control of their processes and realize value for their businesses. In fact, our customers were the biggest factor in the successful ideation, design and creation of the new Studio experience. Almost every facet of the updated product was designed based on direct feedback we received, and the close collaboration between our customers and the Celonis teams resulted in a truly unique and successful collaboration that really embodied Celonis’ core values and mission. 
 

What obstacles and challenges did your team encounter — and overcome — while launching the new Studio experience?

One of the biggest challenges my team faced was striking the right balance between offering a solution that’s powerful and flexible for all kinds of customers and use cases, while also guiding users and offering a tool that’s easy to use. One example from my experience was when we were considering how our users build charts. In our legacy Views system, we had a lot of flexibility because users could essentially create any visualization they wanted but there was very little guidance or help for users built into the product. We found that many of our customers, especially those just starting out, struggled with knowing how to get started and often weren’t able to build the visualizations they needed without additional support. 

This led us to an entirely new chart template approach that provides guiding chart templates to help users get started, while still allowing flexibility to build on top of and customize these templates. This challenge of balancing flexibility and simplicity was the primary focus of the new Studio building experience.
 

What’s the biggest lesson your team has taken away from this launch, and how has it changed the way your team operates?

One of the biggest lessons I learned from this launch was the importance of getting your product in front of customers as early as possible. During this launch, we implemented an extensive early adopter program that ran for several months before the official product release. We interacted with many of these customers weekly, and their excitement and engagement throughout the program were remarkable. The constant input and feedback we received from them were instrumental in driving our product development decisions. 

The success of this model has had a significant impact on the way our team plans to operate going forward, and as we move on from this successful release our team intends to keep these valuable lines of open communication with our customers moving forward.

How Side Projects at Celonis Cultivate Creative Thinking

“The main practice we adopted is encouraging side projects. Team members are allowed to dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to working on low-priority side projects. This cultivates ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking by:

• Empowering autonomy and ownership, leading to more engaged and creative problem-solving
• Providing a low-pressure environment to explore new technologies and unconventional solutions
• Encouraging diverse perspectives and the application of novel approaches
• Facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas and the discovery of hidden talents
• Breaking free from routine tasks, promoting fresh and imaginative thinking

This exploration enables our engineers to experiment and learn, leading to more innovative contributions to Celonis.”

 

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

Some of the original low-priority projects eventually become high-priority initiatives. For example, we initially started the Duplicate Invoice Checker Assistant as a P2 project, but it recently passed the launch review and entered private preview.

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

We believe this approach is valuable not only for allowing team members to satisfy their curiosity and develop new skills — including working with state-of-the-art technologies — but also for driving innovation and inspiring new projects. Team members also have the opportunity to contribute to initiatives outside the immediate scope of the team by collaborating with colleagues across different areas.