ActionIQ Hackathons: A Brief History
By Nitay Joffe
So, what exactly is a hackathon? A hackathon is an event in which individuals come together to collaborate on a project in a limited amount of time, typically over the course of a few days. The goal is to develop a working prototype or solution to a problem that can be presented at the end of the event. Hackathons can focus on a variety of themes or topics, from software development and product design to office and productivity tools.
Hackathons started at ActionIQ in 2015 as a way to encourage collaboration and innovation among our employees. Since inception, we have continued to host hackathons twice, sometimes three times a year, with 2–3 day durations. Our hackathons are open to all employees, regardless of their job function or department, and we encourage cross-functional teams to form.
One of the key differentiators for our Hackathons is that it’s company wide and a focused time for highly creative and collaborative mode with no outside distractions. All employees near and far gather in our NYC office (we fly remote folks in too). We take care of the basic and fun needs (food, snacks, coffee, swag, stickers) and remove all interruptions so that there is a high level of freedom and autonomy to focus on the projects.
The dedicated time for Hackathon feels different for an engineer who, on a typical day, is spread out b/w various projects and on-call, or for a People team member, who is immersed in onboarding and business tasks. With hackathons, our employees have dedicated time to focus and put all of their creative energy into a new and exciting project. We welcome ideas that have nothing to do with code; one year, our team installed a bathroom light that switched on and off for folks on the other side of the office to know whether or not it was occupied. Also equally important, even if not participating, everyone is aware of the event and work at hand, so it shifts the energy in our space. There is a respect and boundary set for those working on hackathon projects.
I believe that running a successful hackathon means enabling creativity. Depending upon the time of year, we may provide suggested themes based on the market, internal needs, or the theme may just be “hack away” with no set goal to truly enable and foster a free flow of ideas.
And what’s a Hackathon without a healthy level of competition. To establish the competition, we have trophy awards and paper plate awards that are upvoted by participants, like “Most likely to delight customers” and “Best presentation/originality”. Winners receive gift cards and team dinners alongside, of course, bragging rights. The awards are preceded by demos. Similar to when a startup demos their product, this is the first time teams showcase a new idea and that creates a natural goal within a time constraint that forces decision making. Teams have to make trade offs in order to meet the demo deadline. No one wants to be the team without a demo, and that has rarely happened due to the concentrated time and commitment of our employees. Some demos include costumes and video aspects while others are simply some engineers with a terminal walking through code. We welcome it all!
At the end of every Hackathon, it’s incredible to see how many of the projects end up going into production and adding immediate value and impact to the company. It delights me to see that even though we give little guidance, every team and project is incredibly aligned with the needs of our company.
Looking ahead, I am excited to see what our employees will come up with at future hackathons as they continue to be an integral part of our culture.
Actually, we just recently wrapped our Spring Hackathon, so I gotta wrap this up and get back to prioritizing how to ship all the great ideas.
Nitay Joffe is the CTO and Founder of ActionIQ. After engineering Facebook’s data infrastructure, Nitay founded ActionIQ to explore his passion for databases, distributed systems and big data. In his spare time you’ll find Nitay on a ski slope or climbing a boulder.
ActionIQ is a leader in the massive and fast growing category of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Our product brings order to customer experience (CX) chaos. ActionIQ’s CX Hub empowers everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data, while helping technical teams regain control of where data lives and how it is used. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Hertz, Atlassian and many more use our CX Hub to achieve growth through extraordinary customer experiences.
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