Last week we run a Hackathon experiment at my company. The overall experience was a blast, it was my first time in an event this kind and honestly, it’s hard for me to understand how these sort of events do not take place more often everywhere. Here you can find what I learned from it.
First of all, what is a Hackathon?
A Hackathon is a collaborative engineering event where domain experts join efforts to come up with experiments in a relative short amount of time, usually 24 to 48 hours.
Gigantic ROI
Companies in general seem to be afraid of running this sort of events as in the end we are talking about tons of working days that are not invested in “what we are expected to do” so, why doing it?
Team Building
It was amazing having most of the team together in one place for an extended period of time without daily operation interruptions. We all had the possibility to interact and develop with different team members than the ones we usually do. By bringing our best into the group, the bonding level within the team became even stronger.
Creativity
Running this hackathon was another demonstration that wisdom lies within the team. Everyone had amazing ideas to bring the product to the next level. The end results shown a great variety of results and lots of ideas can now be taken into consideration for the final product.
Passing the ‘I don’t see it’ threshold
Sometimes talking about it or sharing slides it’s not enough, you need to spend a minimum amount of time to shape and make that idea real so that everyone can understand it better and get the deserved buy-in.
Actual Progress
It’s amazing to see the progress a team can do within a short amount of time. In most of the cases we can consider the work done as actual progress that can definitely be incorporated in the long term plan.
Increased Product Engagement
One of the things I love from the game industry is the level of passion of everyone around. When running this sort of events this passion connects with the product at a deep level, everyone has a much better grasp about the product and its potential behind.
PRODUCTION LEARNINGS
As said before one of the learnings is that is very interesting to see the progress teams can do in such a short amount of time. It shows multiple things:
The power of focus
By removing distractions and creating momentum, we are providing the environment where great progress can emerge. It’s also a demonstration that pair programming works well for exploratory projects.
No requirements experiment
Interestingly one of the factor that changes in these productions is that the communication between ideation and implementation is immediate given that ideation is run by the same developers in many cases. This means that the time invested into defining requirements it’s really minimum, and what really matters is the discovery process, adopting a more agile approach overall.
The time invested into defining requirements it’s really minimum, and what really matters is the discovery process, adopting a more agile approach overall.
About the hybrid format
In our case some team members could not come into the office for the event. Although they could fully contribute at every level in the same way, I still feel it’s an organizational challenge to make them feel as if they were in the office.
Conditions FOR success
Finally I’d like to share my view on what I consider were the keys for success.
With freedom comes great responsibility
The whole event was running very freely. All we were asking was for ideas minimally related to our product. During the event I got the feedback that when they felt so much freedom, they also felt the responsibility to come up with something valuable.
Product strategy
I saw other hackathons where the organizing team was trying to influence the proposals by incentivizing somehow. For instance: we are looking for the best solution to increase engagement. By bringing a push into certain goals we might be missing the cost of opportunity, and many good ideas might never see the light.
My takeaway here is that is good to share about the product strategy so that everyone can consider it during the ideation process, at the same time keeping the freedom spirit to blossom ideas in any other direction.
The right time
It’s important to be strategic and intentional in terms of timing. You don’t want to break the focus in the middle of other developments.
Great team
Fortunately in our case we were counting on mature senior teams with great ability to self-organize, ideate and a strong determination to bring ideas to completion. These are really important ingredients to make the recipe work, the credit goes to them!
Xavier Figueras 