Hawkathon 1.0: Why Hackathons Need To Be A Part of Your Company Culture
If you come from a technical background, you’re probably familiar with hackathons. A hackathon is a limited-time event to various teams to accomplish projects in a friendly competition with judging and prizes at the end. And if you’ve participated in one before, there’s a clear takeaway: hackathons are a crazy amount of fun and the productivity output rivals a normal day’s exponentially.
To pull off a hackathon at AdHawk for the first time required introducing much of the company to the concept. Those who’d participated in the past knew firsthand the virtues of putting smart people in a room together to tackle pervasive company problems and devise unique solutions. The challenge is much of the company viewed a hackathon as an unknown concept, as if marketing were holding a “salesathon” or account managers a “happython.”
There’s an old adage about finding work you enjoy and you won’t work a day of your life. While the hackathon was work-related, the tone of the environment and surrounding energy vanished any thought of the sort. People had the opportunity to meet others in departments that rarely get interaction with and rid themselves of their biggest daily pain points.
There was no waterfall of events through project managers, designers, and fitting into future development sprints. Teams gathered together to solve issues, broke them apart into individual tasks, and delivered mind-blowing results in 24 hours.
Setting up the Event
In order to hold a hackathon, you need a committee to handle logistics. A pitch in our #general slack channel resulted in about a dozen interested volunteers from various departments. We met weekly for half an hour to handle the following issues:
1) Topics & Team Setup
What are we building anyway? Going with the motif of company-wide inclusivity, we crowdsourced project topics from all employees. Anyone could fill out a Google Form doc issuing a task they’d be interested in solving. A few periodically-spaced blasts in Slack got us enough results to have a solid list of potential issues.
Rather than hold sign ups in advance, we allowed teams to be picked on the spot. Top priority was allowing participants to be working exactly where they were most interested and ensuring anyone could join this completely optional event, even at the last minute.
2) Prizes & Categories
Being a friendly competition, and as an additional reward for all the effort put into the projects, we raised the stakes by including prizes. To properly set these up we needed to decide on categories. After a brief discussion on the aspects of projects to focus on, we settled on these awards (with various gift cards and trophies):
- Gold Medal Award— Overall 1st Place
- Buffett Award — Most Likely to Make Money
- Rick & Morty Award — Thinking Outside the Box
- Babe Ruth Award — Most Ambitious / Swinging for the Fences
- Coco Chanel Award — Best Style & Design
3) Judges
To decide the winners of the above categories, we assembled a representative from each department to form what essentially functioned as a jury panel. After hearing the final presentations from each team, judges convened in a closed-off room and emerged with the decided winners.
The Big Day
The hackathon kickoff started at noon. After running through how the prizes and judging would work, a list of ideas was put on display along with a sign-up sheet. Groups of all sizes naturally formed and immediately teams huddled into breaking out strategies.
The productivity of the hackathon itself was off the charts. Unencumbered by boundaries, people crossed beyond job titles and focused on one common goal: solving the task at hand as efficiently as possible.
To differentiate the hackathon from a typical workday, we pulled out speakers and put on a playlist. Later in the day pizza and craft beer arrived. It felt like a productive party, blending the lines between work and leisure.
When 6 o’clock rolled around, many of the employees remained. People kept their eyes on the prize, with some taking breaks for the occasional Super Smash Bros tournament. Come 10 o’clock, more than a dozen remained, writing web crawlers, unit tests for photo uploads, adding SEO optimizations, or playing cards. As the night went on, it felt like a sleepover with your buddies from back in the day. Everyone was in a flow state of enjoyment, collaborating and building with the lights of Manhattan glowing through the windows in our SoHo office.
Presentations
Come 12 noon the next day, it was presentation and judging time. Most teams put together a slideshow deck and we went through team-by-team with a maximum of 5 minutes per pitch.
What happened next blew away everyone in the room. The caliber of the presentations was exceptional. Solutions were executed for issues that had plagued the company for years. Pain points deemed too expensive and time-intensive to implement had production-level solutions, with tested code. It was presentation after presentation of team-supported ingenuity.
Project Spotlight: Hawk Report
A pain point experienced by the Account Management team is a third party PDF generation software that functions as little more than an API wrapper for Google AdWords and Facebook ad accounts integration. The add-on lacks desired features and has customization limits.
Here’s the real kicker — the license price is dependent on the number of connected accounts. As our company has grown, so has the price for a formerly inexpensive third party software. The proposed contract extension came out to a whopping $18,000 — per month. An absolutely insane price to pay for PDF reports of ad campaigns.
The project drew team members from across departments at AdHawk: engineering, business analytics, account managers, marketing, sales, and more. The inter-divisional collaboration allowed insights that would not have been possible with typical departmental teams.
From an engineering perspective, I picked up quick workflows for generating and sending PDFs through Google Data Studio. Already part of the Google ecosystem, Google’s Data Studio can easily pull in Google Analytics stats, and PDFs can be generated with a single click or auto-scheduled.
In Conclusion
There was unanimous agreement that the productivity of the hackathon was incomparable to a typical workday. Even now, three weeks after the conclusion, sprints have been altered to build upon features debuted from the competition. The next hackathon is in the works for six months from now and based on all the positive feedback from the first one, employee participation is expected to be even higher.
Now that we’ve gone over what it takes to plan and execute a hackathon, the ball’s in your court to introduce the event to your company’s culture.
