Coffee, Breakfast Rolls, and Problem Solvers: A Hackathon Story
Written by Jordan Leach, Software Engineering Senior Manager
At FanDuel there are many things that we love and one of our favourite internal events is our Hackathons. You may have seen that recently our Data space hosted their own Hackathon that you can read the details here! Within our Core Products & Experiences (CPE) domain at FanDuel we hosted our own Hackathon that had participants from across our Design, Engineering and Product spaces. Each of the teams competed throughout the week (yes, a week!) to build their ideas with hopes of being crowned the “Champion”.
For those that don’t know what a “Hackathon” is, it originates from software engineers “hacking an idea or a problem through the use of software”. It’s not about breaking a secure system or stealing a piece of information. The goal is to bring people from all different backgrounds, let them collaborate, and see what they come up with after a period of time. For our CPE Hackathon, we gave our Hackers 5 days to do just that.
One of the exciting aspects of the CPE Hackathon was that we had participants located in 4 different locations (Atlanta, New York City, Edinburgh, and Cluj) across 3 different time zones! This presented an interesting challenge for the team that hosted the event as well as gave many of the participants the opportunity to work with people in different locations and for some the opportunity to travel internationally to work with their teams! The theme for our Hackathon aligned with one of FanDuel principles, “We are one team”, and the Hackathon was not only a great opportunity for people to work with each other across different locations but also across the different disciplines within FanDuel; Design, Product and Engineering!
We asked Matthew Wilson, Software Engineer, what his favourite part about the CPE Hackathon was and he said “getting to work with people across the vertical that I don’t usually get to work with. I really think getting to know your colleagues as whole people makes us better collaborators and therefore makes the domain stronger as a whole. We are one team!”
What were our winning ideas?
We challenged our participants to think differently and gave them opportunities to “win” in a variety of ways. With that in mind, we provided four categories for our problem solvers at our Hackathon:
1. Savvy Engineering Solution
2. Customer Obsessed
3. Fan Favorite
4. “We are the Champions” aka our Overall Winners
Saavy Engineering Solution
Winner: I Trust You!
Michael Wright, Principal Engineer, and the rest of his team spent the week focusing on how to improve FanDuel’s Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) process. While FanDuel today utilizes MFA to authenticate our user’s the technology does have its limitations. Michael & Co spent the week building a solution that through the integration with Twilio would allow for additional users to take advantage of FanDuel’s platform while reducing the number of devices that FanDuel has to continuously remember.
Customer Obsessed
Winner: Customer Happiness
One of our teams from Cluj were obsessed with making sure our customers are happy! They created a solution that collects a variety of metrics from sources such as DataDog, Google Analytics and Amplitude to then predict and expose the customer’s happiness score. They used AWS’ machine learning technology, AWS Sagemaker, to help develop their predictions. With their idea they found opportunities to not only ask for feedback but also tie our customer’s happiness into potentially offering them specific promotions that could help improve their happiness. At FanDuel, the customer always comes first!
Fan Favorite
Winner: FanSnake for Apple Watch
Our next team used their time during the Hackathon to learn something new! The team developed the classic snake game for the Apple Watch. The traditional apples were replaced by a competitors logo and as the snake grew longer it spelled out FanDuel. This was a great example of a fun hack that allowed the team to use the week to learn something new!
“We are the Champions”
Winner: FanDuel Replay
Our final team (and overall winners!) is the FanDuel Replay team. FanDuel replay is an interactive feature that provides users with a “replay” of their stats in each of FanDuel’s products. It provides our customers with their success in a data driven format. Examples could be how many wagers they placed, the number of legs in their biggest parlay, their winning bet with the longest odds, and even who their favorite player to wager on was! When asked what inspired her team’s idea, Daisy Swain, Product Designer, said “On the product side they’ve always wanted to provide customers with an experience that is data driven and celebrates how they’ve used our products. The CPE Hackathon was a great opportunity to work with a team of a diverse skillset and bring an idea like FanDuel Replay to life”. Congratulations to our overall winners and their idea of FanDuel Replay!
