Hack Day 20: 20/20 for 2020
Innovation is core to all that we do at Castlight. We look for every opportunity to surface and implement the best ideas from our talented team members, and Hack Days are one of our best fountains of creativity. For the past five years we’ve hosted quarterly, internal hackathons as a fun challenge to Castlight employees to pursue ideas they may not otherwise have a chance to develop in their current roles. These ideas improve, innovate, and transform the Castlight user experience, while also providing our entire team with additional opportunities for fun and intellectually stimulating team-building time.
The Engineering team hosts Hack Days, but we encourage and receive participation from across the company. We take a very inclusive approach to hacking. We love it when teams code and build software and hardware hacks they can demo, but we also love innovative mockups, business cases, and data analyses.
For Castlight, the benefit of Hack Days is clear. In addition to the team building aspects of the day, some of the company’s best ideas have come from our hackathons. It has been incredibly satisfying to see the new ideas we prototype in a Hack Day be so rapidly integrated into our products and operations.
Hack Day 20
We held our twentieth hackathon in October. Hack Day 20 kicked off on a Friday morning with pitches for 24 projects. 55 hackers self-organized into teams and hacked all day, with some working over the weekend. 16 teams then presented their results on Monday.
The theme for Hack Day 20 was forward-looking ideas that could have a big impact in 2020, perhaps leading to a new product line, a major extension to an existing product, new partner APIs, automation of complex manual processes, or significantly increasing the value of data we already have. The Product and Engineering teams will select a group of these projects to pursue in 2019.
Hack Day awards are centered around our corporate values — One Team, On a Mission, Making Things Happen. Prizes have included a bread-making class with our CEO, selection of a new snack (cold-brew coffee!) for one of our kitchens, lunch with an executive to pitch an idea, and a personalized, science-based beverage tasting with me.
One Team
The winner of the One Team Hack was the Castlight Advocate UI Design team. This project assists users in contesting suspicious claims by flagging potential errors, educating users, and connecting them with help.
On a Mission
The On a Mission Hack was won by the Mindfulness team. The Castlight app already supports challenges that are primarily based on steps tracked by fitness trackers. This team prototyped a new kind of challenge in which users are rewarded for participating in traditional mindfulness activities, like breathing exercises.
Making Things Happen
The Health Score team scored (sorry) the Making Things Happen Hack. They derived a user health score that could be based on either the baseline of an employer’s population or on our book of business population using steps, sleep, nutrition, and biometrics. They modified the UI to both show a user their score and to nudge them in ways to improve it.
Congratulations to the winning teams and thanks to all of the intrepid Castlight hackers for yet another day full of great ideas and collaboration across teams. We look forward to bringing these ideas to life as we continue to bring our employees together at events that further Castlight’s culture and mission. See you next time!
(🎩 Hat tip to Lloyd and Jim for editing assistance)
