FanDuel Hackathon 2019
Last month saw the whole of FanDuel Group put down our day-to-day tools and tasks to take part in the biggest company-wide Hackathon.
What’s a Hackathon?
At FanDuel a Hackathon can take many forms, it could be a day, a few days or a full week, where we come together as colleagues (and often strangers in a company this size) to work on things we feel are important for ourselves and our users.
The basic premise is that a seed of an idea is the starting point for a week-long sprint to bring that idea to life, test it and validate — often the case is that things change over that week but we always record and refer back to the original idea as that’s part of the narrative.
Why do a Hackathon?
There are so many reasons why hackathons are great but I’ll list a few that act as guiding principles for us at FanDuel.
We are one team. Team culture is incredibly important at FanDuel, however you won’t get the chance to work with everyone and some areas of the business may have little to do with each other day-to-day. A hackathon is a perfect chance for folk to get to know each other, learn from each other and build relationships.
We believe anything is possible. We build new and exciting products/features for our users all day every day. A hackathon is where we can come up with the crazy ideas, the things that could transform an experience into something unimaginable. No idea is off bounds during that week which makes things incredibly exciting.
We believe in challenging ourselves. We take immense care and consideration when we build for our users. A hackathon is when we throw those rules books out the window, we literally hack things together to see what can be achieved, what can be learnt. The driving force behind this is to allow us to challenge ourselves and ultimately learn from the success in failures and share these with our colleagues.
How do you do a Hackathon?
The most important part of a hackathon is generating ideas for teams to form around. You’ll need a single source of truth that everyone can access and contribute and start to build teams.
When a team has formed and the hackathon begins, we always start our hackathon project with an informal kick-off session followed by an intensive Design Studio session where we get all team members together (remote and in-person) to generate ideas, analyse them and help align each other’s thoughts.
We then structure the week in a design sprint format, looking to understand, define, ideate, decide, prototype, validate (or test).
Day 1
Understand: We look to understand the problem or opportunity. As a team, we might run a ‘How Might We’ session or have a few lightning talks, bringing in relevant knowledge and insights which help us understand the idea.
Define: We also look to define success and understand what we want to achieve in such a short space of time.
Ideate: Next, we challenge ourselves to think beyond our current ideas, by generating a wide variety of possible solutions to our problem. A common method we use to do this is Crazy Eights.
Day 2/3
Prototype/ build: By day 2 we are ready to create something. Depending on the nature of the idea, we might build a prototype in Sketch or Principle, or we might look to prove feasibility by building the front-end and/ or back end.
Day 4:
Validate/test: Before we present our progress back to our colleagues the team comes back together and revisit many of the outputs of day one. Ensuring that what we’ve proposed solves the problem we identified at the start of the hackathon. In a real world sprint we’d put together a research plan and test our prototype with users, however time is short so we just test
Day 5:
Present: On the final day of the hackathon, we present our prototypes and thinking to the company. These presentations are a great way to share both ideas and learnings to everyone. And, if you need to refine the idea and spend a little more time on it you can pitch for help from others during company 10% time, which is a company-wide initiative allowing employees to work on any project of their choice.
At the end of the hackathon all ideas, in whatever state, are listed with links to repos, Abstract collections, prototypes or live demos as well as the initial problem statement. This helps our delivery teams decide what we are able to take forward, build and deliver into our product suite.
Many ideas from this hackathon are continuing to be worked on so we have some super exciting things in the pipeline. Keep your eyes out!
