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H O W - T O

Run a hack-day to solve your next product challenge

Antonia Horvath
Bootcamp
Published in
8 min readApr 14, 2021

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What’s a hackathon, usually?

People with different backgrounds and expertise come together to solve a problem through software. In a limited timeframe and through intense collaboration. Hackathons are run out of different motivations: To solve a challenge for society. To practice a particular technology. To attract talent or to solve business challenges with fresh minds. A phenomenal concept.

Experiment: a product-focused hack-day

Having worked with different teams on a variety of digital products, I like to carefully craft highlights that lift the teams spirit and bring fresh perspectives in the delivery phase. I was looking for an opportunity to experiment with a hackathon because I love the playful, yet intense collaboration. Last year, I ran the first product-focused hack-day experiment with my team.

Who can run it?

Everyone in a software development team, who wants to try a different, collaborative approach to problem-solving. Designers, product managers, and engineers alike can run a product-focused hack-day. Even when you are not normally a leader, this is a great opportunity to lead your team and practice facilitation techniques.

A colourful illustration of a woman who leans on a giant hourglass. She is bored by the usual product development rhythm.
Highlights like a hack-day can spice up the delivery phase

Like a design sprint paired with a technical spike

Think of a product-focused hack-day as a mix of a design sprint and a technical spike, run in one day. I picked a product challenge, pitched the idea to my team and they got excited about it. Two days later, everyone stepped aside from their usual work and focused on solving a challenge together. It felt like a day in the workshop, crafting the bizarre and eventually, something useful.

Outcomes

It’s up to you to design the outcome of a hack-day. It could be prototypes in real code that you can test with users to validate your product hypotheses. This was the desired outcome when I ran the last two hack-days with my teams. Or maybe you‘d like to explore a problem from a technical perspective in a timeboxed manner? If you can, focus on a key challenge for your users.

No matter the focus, a hack-day will help your team shift their perspective away from business as usual and come up with unconventional ideas. It’s most likely also going to be great fun. It will nurture collaboration as a balanced team. And you’ll have something cool to show in your next product demo.

A colourful illustration of a woman who sits on a gigantic present. She is excited to unwrap it.
Example 1: making digitally unwrapping a present fun

Real-world example 1: digitally unwrap a present

The most exciting hack-day I ran with my team so far was when we wanted to investigate different ways to digitally unwrap a present. The goal was to find out whether users would get as excited as in the real world. Everyone in the team came up with cool unwrapping interactions and later in the day we paired up to test whether we can actually get them working. And we did. We tested them with users the week after. One of the unwrapping interactions went live only weeks after the hack-day.

A colourful illustration of a woman who leans on a pie chart. She is in the middle of interpreting data, pointing towards another chart.
Example 2: making analysing data easier

Real-world example 2: make patterns in data visible

Another time, another hack-day. We wanted to explore different ways for our users to easily find patterns in a large amount of data. For our prototype, we wanted to use real data, which is difficult to mock in a design tool. We came up with three different models that we went ahead and built in the afternoon. These prototypes laid the foundation for the next product iteration. They helped us to understand what works and what doesn’t work so well, from a technical perspective.

Ready? Go run your own hack-day

Look for opportunities

Every team member can propose a product-focused hack-day. Whether you are a designer, a product manager, or even an engineer.

Think about picking a tricky product challenge, or kicking off the next major product outcome. Perhaps you have a problem where you don’t yet know the solution. Or your team is divided and cannot yet commit to one solution. The hack-day is a great addition to your regular ideation techniques, particularly when the problem is complex.

Many teams and companies regularly donate their time to give back to local communities. You can use a hack-day event to hack on something to support your own local community and raise team morale.

Validate the problem up-front

Start by defining the challenge and doing some up-front user research to validate that the challenge is relevant for your users. Interview your sponsors to ensure that the challenge has sufficient business value to fetch y’all’s brains for a day to solve it.

A colourful illustration of a woman who is excited about the hack-day. She is surrounded by sticky notes that were created during the hack day.
Get buy-in from your team

The foundations

Find a time where your team can step a whole day aside for a hackathon. Get buy-in from your fellow team members and the product owner. Consider inviting subject matter experts, if helpful for the challenge. Organize facilities, if in person. Get the day booked into everyone’s diary.

Ensure whiteboards, sticky notes, paper, sharpies, a timer, and other fun supplies are available. Make sure everyone has access to an infrastructure that lets them set up branches for their code. Even if messy and hacky, so that you can use the prototypes to test with users afterward. In a remote setup, plan a space for collaboration like a digital whiteboard and set the video conferences plus breakout rooms. A Slack or Teams group doesn’t hurt, either.

Provide snacks, if you can. Even in a remote setting, having a pizza 🍕 delivered is a nice gesture that does not cost the world.

Give you team research prep-work

In the invite, set expectations. Share the problem space and give participants research-prep-work, if appropriate. I like to ask everyone to research at least one cool example of how others solve a similar challenge.

Set the agenda, define facilitators

Plan the agenda by defining key activities, without restricting your team too much. Think about if you want to split your team into pairs or sub-groups. Appoint a facilitator for the day [This can be you 🎉].

“The facilitator’s job is to support everyone to do their best thinking.” — Sam Kaner, Author of Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making

During the day: make some magic

A colourful illustration of a woman who writes code on her laptop during a hack-day. She is surrounded by notes on paper.
Do some magic during the hack-day ✨

Outsmart business as usual

Remember, it’s a hack day, so it’s good to do things differently. As a facilitator, encourage people to work with people they wouldn’t normally, solve problems using different tools and techniques they want to practice, and generally be free of normal workday constraints.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

Start the day together, ideating

Get everyone in one room, share the agenda and the problem space. Set the scenario and define the desired outcomes. Share user evidence to set your team up for success.

If you are looking for some steer in where the teams are going, start the day by running a design studio with everyone. Vote on the ideas that seem the most promising and then split into teams around the top-voted ideas. This way, you collectively decide what to focus on during the day and avoid folks going down irrelevant paths or pursuing similar ideas.

Split into teams and check in with them

Leave the groups to self-organize. In a remote setting, agree where and how you can reach each other. For example: in the last hack-day that I ran, folks have split in breakout-rooms and created dedicated slack channels. As a facilitator, check-in with people to see whether you can help unblock them.

Come together for a shareout

Set a specific time when everyone agrees to come together to share out what they have developed. Ask each team to walk through their work, encourage questions. Document the ideas: take photos, screenshots, and notes that explain the essence. Record, if you can.

At conventional hackathons, the top ideas are rewarded. I like to set expectations with my team that there will not be a reward, but there will be free snacks & pizza. If you can think of something small that makes sense in your context, go for it!

A colourful illustration of a retrospective board with stickies for positive, negative and neutral feedback.
Always ask for feedback

Close off the day with a short retro

Ask your team to reflect on the day and close off with a quick retro: what went well, what didn’t go so well? What will you do differently next time? Make sure you end on a high note.

Next steps: validate and share

As a user’s advocate, I’d like to highlight that this step is key. Validate/invalidate ideas from the hack-day with users before you proceed to implement them. The week after a hack-day is ideal to run a round of qualitative user research.

Feedback from participants

Sticky notes that contain feedback about the hack-day. They say: “A difrent kind of day than normal”, “Omg, how fast can we create something cool?”, “Anything allowed, hacky and fast. We have working prototypes in code now!”, “Great for team bonding!”, and “Learned a lot about the domain.”.
What people have said about the hack-day

Folks were genuinely excited about the speed as well as the creativity of the outcomes. People felt proud of what they have created as a team. They were keen to participate in the user research afterwards to see users’ reaction to their ideas. Some constructive feedback, to consider for your hack-day:

  • 🔎 Provide enough lead-time to enable people to do research in advance
  • 🗓 Make sure peole do not get pulled out. No other appointments that day
  • 🍕 Snacks seem to really matter for people :) Provide them
  • 🥇 People who participated in hackathons before might expect a prize
An image that says in handwriting: “Yay, free stuff!”

The Hack-Day Pack

An illustration of the Miro-template that comes with this article.

Save time and use this free Miro template with a sample agenda and frames for homework, design studio, and feedback

How do you go about keeping the team spirit high and your ideas fresh when building software? I’m curious about your feedback! Find me on LinkedIn.

A big thanks to Tim Jarratt and Dale Owen for sharing your thoughts and feedback. They form the basis of this article 🧡

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Antonia Horvath
Antonia Horvath

Written by Antonia Horvath

Antonia is a design & business leader, facilitator and problem-solver who helps organisations to innovate through digital products with amazing user experiences

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