For eight weeks this summer, the Product & Engineering team at Refinery29 pilot-tested a “Passion Project” initiative where employees were given back 10% of their week to work on the project of their choice. Here’s why we did it, how we did it, what we learned and what the future of this initiative looks like.

Why We Did It

Sprints and calendars fill up quickly. Dedicating time for side projects ensures that we can foster innovation and creative freedom within our team. It’s a way of letting our people know that we care about them and are invested in their personal success. Plus, initiatives like this help expand and fine-tune a person’s skills, knowledge and expertise– be it in their existing field of interest or even a new one– and in turn, the company benefits.

How We Got Started

We exercise summer Fridays already so dedicating the 4-hour day for Passion Projects made scheduling easy. We moved all of our weekly Friday meetings to Thursday, adjusted our regular sprint velocity accordingly and it was done.

Because the Passion Project idea was so reliant on people taking initiative we came up with a few ways to track progress and keep everyone accountable for their time.

How It Went & What We Learned

It wasn’t a requirement that your Passion Project tie back to Refinery29′s mission but, unsurprisingly, a lot of people’s projects did. Our team worked on things like creating an onboarding guide for new hires, automating some of our most tedious processes, creating an art installation for an upcoming company event, learning a new programming language, paying down tech debt and more.



During the 8-week stint, it was awesome to see was how people were inspired by other projects, the company’s potential, and each other. It was as if everyone suddenly felt cleared of the usual blockers it can sometimes take to get something done. Have an idea? Make it happen.

Not everyone shared this sentiment though– some felt that Passion Projects were a distraction from their normal workload and opted not to participate. Fair enough. The initiative was not mandatory because in order for it to be a passion project, there’s got to be passion!

In order to measure these thoughts and the success of the project, we collected feedback through surveys. Here are some highlights from that:

The qualitative feedback we received was centered around themes of feeling empowered, trusted, more connected and committed to the company.

The survey data made it clear that people liked the idea of passion projects and those who participated had great success, but felt the initiative lacked enough structure to make it agreeable by everyone and last in the long term.

The Future of R29 Passion Project

With the pilot test completed and a considerable success we’d really like for everyone at Refinery29 to be able to participate in future Passion Project time. Coordinating an entire company around the 10% time initiative is a huge undertaking though. In order to get buy-in from other department heads and our finance team we’ll need to add more clear guidelines and processes for tracking people’s success and accountability.

That said, Refinery29 is a company that values innovation and standing out; Passion Project is an easy way for us to maintain those values while we grow.

– Daniel Habib, Platform Engineer

