What is a remote Hackathon at DraftKings like?
DraftKings has always had a long-standing tradition of challenging our engineering teams with hackathons, having held annual engineering-wide hackathons for the last five years. This year was no exception; we kept the tradition alive, even though this year’s hackathon was held entirely remotely.
For two days, engineers from our Daily Fantasy and Account Platform teams, in collaboration with members from Product and Design, worked in teams of eight to create new features in our Daily Fantasy applications and website. The theme of this hackathon? Improve a highly critical area of our product: user activation and retention.
How We Hack
The teams were assigned the Friday before the hackathon when the theme was revealed. This assured each team had a mix of experience levels and representations from across all disciplines: backend, web, iOS, Android, design, and product.
Once teams were announced everyone was free to begin brainstorming before development could begin on Monday morning. Nearly every team took advantage of this, quickly forming team Slack channels, compiling ideas via Google Docs, discussions on Zoom, and in some cases voting on which project idea to pursue.
First thing Monday morning teams solidified their project ideas and got to work. Many teams jumped right into coding and some teams even starting all day Zoom sessions that team members could pop in and out of as they worked.
The Winners
After a full day and a half of hacking, teams showcased their projects in “Shark Tank” style presentations to a panel of five judges, comprised of leaders across engineering, design, and product. Projects were scored based on: innovativeness, product fit, functionality, scope, and UX quality.
Remote presentations over Zoom offered unique ways to engage, with teams often changing their background images to match their team name. (My personal favorite was the image of a shark in a suit.) Throughout the presentations, participants could converse over chat, trading witty banter, asking questions, and commending their peers on innovative ideas.
Best in Show: DoubleHelix
Best in Show went to the DoubleHelix team for their DraftKings University project. Their project introduced a cross-platform, remotely configurable set of onboarding overlays. These overlays created an interactive tutorial that helped users understand how our product works and what functionality is available.
Most Inventive: League of Impressionable Grandmas
Most Inventive went to the League of Impressionable Grandmas for their Instant Sweat Experience project. (If most unique team name were an award, they certainly would have won that too!) Instant Sweat Experience was a Head-to-Head contest against a computer-generated lineup. After sign up, a new user was asked to draft and compete against the DK Bot. The contest ran “Instantly” after the user drafted, allowing the user to immediately experience the GameCenter sweat.
“Staff Favorite”: The Hacktivators
Staff Favorite went to the Hacktivators for the Perfect Progress Component. Our current FTUE (first-time user experience) has no onboarding or helpful guides for new users. We dropped them off in the middle of the woods with no food or water… We must do better! By guiding someone through their top new user to-do’s, we introduced them to all they need to know — while rewarding them for completing those important tasks.
Want to join us for our next hackathon?
Interested in joining the DraftKings Engineering team and participating in our next hackathon? You can see what roles we currently have open and learn more about what it’s like to work at DraftKings on our careers site.
Want to learn more about our hackathon? Tune in to the podcast below to listen to the winning team get more in-depth on their hackathon experience.
