Ellation’s First Hackday
Last month we held our very first Hackday at Ellation (Internal Hackathon). If the inaugural Hackday made one thing clear, it’s that a collaborative and innovation driven culture is very important to us. In the past half year, we grew from 150 to 300 employees and nurtured offices in Europe, Japan and San Francisco.
When it came to Hackday participation, there was talent from across all teams including Engineering, Finance, PeopleOps, Facilities, Marketing Design, Product Design, Customer Service, Marketing, Business Operations and Product Management. We looked at this as an opportunity to contribute to the rapid growth we’ve had. It gave us both a challenge and the ability to scale our culture globally across our expanding teams. Even as we grow our team in our three respective offices, we bring our people closer together to achieve greater things.
Building a Culture of Innovation
Hackday helped build bonds across teams in ways that other events haven’t been able to. People who have never worked together, came up with and built ideas that were inspiring, original, fun, and simply awesome.
It fueled innovation in the company. The ideas went beyond what we expected and got people not only thinking about how to make the company better, but also do so in areas that they normally wouldn’t venture into.
We kept it stupidly simple!
- All teams had 24 hours to build, create or change whatever they wanted to.
- Each participant or team gave a 90 second presentation to our judges and the rest of the company.
- We got together to cheer on the teams and watch the demos!
Opportunity to take 24 hours and do the following:
- Create an Internal Tool
- Build a cool feature for our users. (Social Impact)
- Build an innovative feature for our users
- Improve our Revenue model.
Teams were also judged on who formed the most diverse team (such as department and location)!
Technology + Creativity + Freedom + Responsibility = Hackday
At our first Hackday, globally we had 30 teams, about 100 participants and the entire company attending all the live demos.
Hackday wouldn’t have been successful without the support of top management and Tom Pickett, our CEO. Our judging panel consisted of: Arlen Marmel, VP, Marketing;Simon Obstbaum, CTO; Quincy Carroll, CPO, Thomas Overton, VP of Engineering;Tom Hurlbutt, Group Product Manager; Soumya Lakshmi, Head of Quality Engineering and Desiree Therianos, VP of PeopleOps.
The judges had a tough time evaluating the hacks as all of the ideas were competitive and compelling. As we clean up our hacks, we look forward to releasing them to users in the near future.
Join Us!
Do you want to be part of our amazing team and participate in our next Hackday? We are Hiring! http://www.ellation.com/jobs/
