Skunkworks @ Hudl
We recently wrapped our Spring 2018 Skunkworks event at Hudl. We wanted to share our process and a few winning projects.
What’s this about a skunk?
For those unfamiliar with the concept, “skunk works” describes a team within a company that has nearly unlimited autonomy, often tasked with working on advanced R&D projects. Lockheed Martin created the concept (and name), and organizations around the world have adopted the practice as a way to loosen the reins on teams and give them added freedom to create. Hudl’s Skunkworks isn’t a permanent group within our product team, but a special event where our whole product team is tasked to self organize and work on new projects.
The core tenets of Skunkworks at Hudl are to:
- Get energized and creative
- Explore something new
- Work with other Hudlies
- Test the limits
- Inspire the team
Our Process
During the month leading up to the event, we had a live idea board posted where anyone across the company could submit a project idea. We saw members of our Support team posting project ideas that would improve their workflows, Sales adding moonshot features or missing integrations between existing products, and the Product Team itself posting projects that ranged from trying out new tech to porting old systems to new platforms. Hudlies were encouraged to start forming teams around the projects that interested them. Since teams formed based on project interest, we found project rosters with diverse Hudlies who hadn’t worked together previously. Skunkworks is a great time to meet new people around the company.
Skunkworks is also an opportunity for Hudlies to try their hand at new roles. Scrum masters and Quality Analysts were writing code, Engineers were leading prioritization of teams and backlogs, roles from outside the Product Team joined projects and got to work on building software (or hardware) for the first time.
We scheduled three days for our product team to drop all of their commitments and participate in Skunkworks. That means no regular squad meetings (planning, stand up, review, retro) — just an open calendar for Skunkworks teams to allocate at their discretion.
Rules
There are only a handful of rules for Skunkworks. The primary one: this isn’t a time to work on your backlog. No catching up on your roadmap, or reprioritizing something your team would eventually tackle. Ideas should be new, risky, and opportunities to learn.
We also highly discourage solo projects, asking Hudlies to try to form a team around their idea before deciding to go it alone. Throughout the years we’ve seen many solo projects grind to a halt when the person working on them gets stuck. With only three days to work, lost time has a severe impact on how close a project can get to its goal.
Fuel
That premium on time is one of the reasons we help take care of the basics; catering in snacks (both healthy and not so much) for the length of the event, and providing food for any teams that choose to stay late and keep working.
Demos
Showing the rest of the company what we created continues to be one of the biggest challenges in running this event. Hudl’s product team spans five physical offices with a large remote working contingent. Even if all of those people were in one place, the number of projects would lead to hours of back to back presentations if we let teams demo their work in a traditional format.
Given these challenges, our approach to project demos was two-fold: submit a short (two minute) demo video, and sign up for a time to demo work at an in-office Demo Day. We experimented with a new format for Demo Day this year — aiming for an experience similar to a school science fair. We set up booths in our cafeteria during lunch and invited the whole company to stop and take a look.
Awards
We hand out awards in three categories following the posting of demos. A panel of judges from around the company were selected to review each demo and rank their top three choices in each category. Our winners this time around were:
Best in Show — Hudlgram
The best overall project went to a team that experimented with features in our iOS and Android apps for sharing highlight videos directly to Instagram. The team even pulled in members of Hudl Studios, our in-house content team, to make sure they could still track sharing and reach of posts shared outside Hudl’s own timeline.
Best New Tech — Coach Analytics
The projects that experiment with the most promising new technology, or find the most creative use for an existing technology, are eligible for the “Best New Tech” award.
The Coach Analytics team worked to improve our usage logging tooling (using Snowplow) to create a proof of concept for one of our most requested features — detailed video watch time reporting for coaches.
Spirit of Skunkworks — GTFO Light
This award is given to the project that best upheld the core tenets of Skunkworks, as mentioned above: Get energized and creative, Explore something new, Work with other Hudlies, Test the limits, and Inspire the team.
The winning project aimed to solve an ever present problem across our office spaces — a previous meeting’s attendees overstaying their welcome in a room. The GTFO Light integrated Outlook calendars with Philips Hue smart bulbs to trigger pulsing lights as a meeting approaches its time limit, encouraging attendees to “Get To Future Obligations”.
What’s next?
Some of these projects will be adopted by existing teams and see continued development, others have already been rolled out internally, but even more won’t live on past this event. That’s okay!
Our goal with Skunkworks isn’t to ship new features to customers (although that’s sometimes a neat side benefit). It’s for Hudlies to get creative, learn something, and have fun.
We already have our next Skunkworks scheduled for October 2018. If you want to join us — we’re hiring!
