How we do hackathons at Alan
I love portmanteau words: I’m always surprised by the creativity they demonstrate. Hackathon is one of those words: a mix of “hacker” and “marathon”. It’s full of imagery and almost self-explanatory: a hackathon is when “hackers”, passionate non-conformists, do a hacking marathon. Basically, they gather to build/modify/improve products collaboratively in a limited amount of time.
A few days to “hack” brings energy and team strength.
Too often, hackathons are thought to be restricted to Engineers. Someone asked me if a hackathon “was the thing when Engineers drink a lot of Coke and sweat”.
At Alan, we try to make our hackathon a company event, open to everyone. Here is how we do it.
Hackathons are daring contests
The hackathon is the perfect occasion for all Alaners to try to make Alan better. The goal is not to build the perfect feature, or to come up with the one idea that will improve our product for the next ten years. The goal is for Alaners to dare trying out ideas, to dare creating something that does not exist yet, to dare voicing their dreams for Alan, for Alaners, or for our members.
Our hackathon is also the perfect occasion to embark newcomers in this adventure. Newcomers are often grappling with imposter syndrome. We noticed that recent joiners were not feeling legitimate enough to edit the company. It might sound complex at first: how could they have better ideas than what already exists? How could they try to fix what is broken? Challenging the status quo is intimidating. We made the hackathon the place for newcomers to start editing the company by contributing, even in small amounts, to daring projects.
Define clear event owners
The most important thing is for the owners to be good communicators: it’s what will get people onboard.
At Alan, our knowledge manager (me) is organising the bi-annual hackathon, in collaboration with our co-founder and CTO (Charles Gorintin) and our Product Lead (Gabriel Hubert). Even if we don’t play on hierarchy at Alan, Charles’ voice is very respected and has a specific weight. Gabriel is a tremendous public speaker.
This cocktail was successful. Alaners were:
- Clear on the different steps to follow (good communication)
- Engaged (strong leadership voice)
- Entertained (excellent public speaking deliveries)
Communicate at scale
Some Alaners didn’t even know what a hackathon was. The goal was to communicate to everyone about it. Here is how we presented it: “It’s a product-building event. The goal is to create a somewhat functioning product by the end of the 3 days. Basically, it’s several teams gathering around a crazy idea for which they have limited time to develop.” We also strongly encouraged non-technical people to take part in the hackathon by contributing to exciting stuff: learning Figma’s basics to design a mock-up, editing a process, interviewing team members, simplifying documentation.
We created a simple Trello board with 3 columns: “Project ideas” for everyone to add their ideas, without any censorship. Then we moved the cards to the “Need teammates” column when we saw traction in the card. Finally, cards were moved to the “Fully staffed” column when the project was on track. Having everything centralised in a Trello board helped wanna-be participants browsing all projects and to add themselves to whichever one they were interested in.
Take a breath
To be able to innovate, one needs some slack. It’s not possible to innovate if you stay in the normal course of things.
Hackathon is a pause in the company. Alaners are encouraged to drop their usual work, whatever the deadlines and priority, to join the hackathon. It makes sense because creativity put in a hackathon project can sometimes bring the company 100x the value in regard to time spent.
Hackathon is also an occasion to get back to code for some who don’t put their hands into dirt everyday, those who are not Individual Contributors anymore, like our CTO or Engineering Lead.
Take a breath, you said? In a marathon? Yep. A hackathon’s rhythm is intense. However, it’s a different kind of intensity than the everyday experience. It’s exciting, it’s a lot of laughing, of frustration, of excitement, of fun. The purpose being different, the intensity eventually turns into a big breath.
Meet new faces
Teams in a hackathon gather around interests and skills, rather than predetermined organizations.
That means you can work with people you never get the chance to work with. People you actually have common interests with; people who have a completely different level of seniority than you; people who you didn’t even know worked in the same company as you all this time. How often a designer is brought to collaborate with a Sales person? How likely is it, as an HR, that you work closely with a Data Scientist?
And trust me, it’s not only about working together. It’s about creating strong bonds. Being in the same boat, with a sense of battling together to get something out, changes the relationship with your colleagues. Running into Caroline the Data Scientist in the hall after having spent hours with her tearing your hair out on a project will never seem dull again.
Build great stuff!
A hackathon is a real playground for moonshot ideas. You can initiate the projects that you want. Then do it alone or with a team. Bring it to production or just present a mockup. The important thing is that you play around with ideas! Developing a whole idea from scratch and presenting a deliverable after 2,5 days is a true adrenaline rush.
During our last hackathon, teams came up with creative and useful ideas. Here are 3 I particularly liked:
- Mickael built the “Anti-burnout bot”, a bot that yells at you on Slack if you didn’t take holidays for 10 weeks in a row. As the bot says, “I know I’m just a bot, but I really know how humans can burn out”.
- Alan Home: a hub that gathers everything Alaners need: the latest company news, a search bar for all internal tools and knowledge base, a personalised reminder section, a portal which tells you what’s your equity worth, a map showing all Alaners working places, etc.
- My Alan’s Profile: this project is ensuring that members of all gender feel safe using Alan. The project aims to allow any member to be referred to with the name, pronouns and emoji of their choice, autonomously. The project has not been deployed for our members yet, but the hackathon allowed this first step.
Prizes
How to make a hackathon attractive while not making it about winning? The secret is simple, silly prizes. The secret lies in socks.
All participants get a fun sticker for their computer: a nice way to show “I was here”, while remembering the moment every day! We wanted to reward winners without making a fuss out of it: winners got a specific winner sticker, and a pair of Alan socks. Yep. We learnt that the secret lies in socks: we did not expect it, but all Alaners loved the sock idea, and the sock emoji is actually a shared reference to the hackathon now.
Sometimes, joy can be found in little things: a hackathon and a pair of socks.
