Hacking Productivity with Hackathons
How can our team of 25 provide a better service than others with 500 or even 1,000 employees?
MailerLite is a small company. But we compete with big sharks in a crowded email marketing space. We’re proud of being small. It makes us fast and efficient.
We work different. We experiment with things like workations, hackathons and other stuff to enhance our productivity.
It’s very hard to build something new while working regular hours in the office. There are so many distractions.
First you come in the morning, have a coffee, chat with others, check your email, have another coffee. Oh it’s lunch time already. After lunch you sit down to work, but then someone comes to ask for help with a small fix, just 5 min they say. You will need another 30 minutes to concentrate and get back to what you were doing. But it’s already time to go home…
Does this sound familiar?
Last week we did a hackathon.
In 48 hours we built a new feature for MailerLite — popup subscribe forms.
It was just 3 guys in a forest house working non-stop without distractions.
It would have taken us a month or even more to build it if we would work regular hours in the office.
It was already 3rd time we’re doing a hackathon. I think it’s the best way to go if you need to launch something fast. But keep in mind that it’s hard and you will need a few days to recover.
There’s no way you could do hackathons every week. But doing it once in a few months can give you amazing results.
