Reinventing Hackathons (Part 2): A Culture of Purposeful Tinkering

Hackathons are one or two day events devoted to free-form tinkering by ad hoc groups of engineers, open to anyone in the group (usually, the whole company). There is a large literature on this mode of innovation, often referred to by a French technical term, bricolage, popularized by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It has almost none of the drawbacks of top-down innovation, listed in Part 1. As Francis Crick once said, “God is a hacker, not an engineer. You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

So why don’t hackathons reliably yield big new innovations for companies, and can anything be done about it?

1. Strategic Relevance: Deliberately lacking any strategic product purpose, hackathons cannot be counted upon to generate ideas relevant to the existing business (and usually don’t).
2. Founder Incentives: Because they don’t offer an entrepreneurial path to production, hackathons often don’t attract the most enterprising employees ‘under cover’ in the organization.
3. Hackathon Cycle: As infrequent one-off events, hackathons are, by themselves, too abbreviated to yield actionable innovation.

Strategic Relevance

Companies want engineers to work on solving problems relevant to their business, yet often fail to communicate what problems to solve. Problems should be defined for three reasons: (i) Organizations want to identify new businesses that they are willing and able to build, and that further their strategic aims; (ii) The quality of anyone’s creativity goes way up when they are wrestling with a well-defined problem. The truth of this is encapsulated in the cliched statistic that 70%-90% of solving a problem is in getting clear about the problem to be solved; and (iii) As Alexander Fleming said of his accidental discovery of antibiotics, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Unless a whole organization, especially its senior staff, is in the habit of looking out for solutions pertaining to a specific vision, it is unlikely to recognize the serendipitous discoveries that emerge from hackathons when they do materialize.

Seemingly contrary to Part 1 (but actually complementary to it), this is where the top-down stance has an important role to play.

The solution to the strategic purpose problem is to communicate a well-defined mission and vision that is both inspiring and broad enough to span desirable categories of growth businesses. There is really no substitute for this level of direction coming from the top, where it partially defines the identity of an organization as a whole. For example, at if(we) our mission is to create products that:

1. Enable meaningful connections between people
   a. Have the potential to reach a billion active users
   b. Are achievable with our capabilities and passion

Our vision breaks this down into three problem domains:

1. Communicating Emotion
2. Authentic Sharing
3. Community for Everyone

Over the course of the last year, we have run workshops with more than half of the company to brainstorm the problems people have in their everyday lives that revolve around these domains, as well as how those problems are traditionally addressed.

Without explicitly setting any product strategy goals for the event, 100% of our hackathon winners last summer were directly relevant to this vision, compared with about 10% in previous years. The only difference was the clarity, consistency, and grass-roots exploration of the topics we had conducted in the months leading up to the hackathon.

Founder Incentives

When engineers band together to create something with the potential to become a large growth business, they feel like founders. In this way, they are motivated to make a large contribution, take risks, and potentially earn a very significant upside.

However, companies tend to view these contributions in terms of their legal ownership of all the code the engineer writes. This is a total buzzkill for any would-be founders in your midst.

The solution is to offer a path to meaningful ownership of the resulting idea — including requiring skin-in-the-game if it is successful or if it fails. I’ll explore these options in a future post after I have collected more data from our own incentives program here at if(we).

Hackathon Cycle

Seasonal one-off hackathons are too infrequent, short, and disconnected to accomplish very much of long-term value. But what can be done about it?

At if(we), instead of traditional prizes, hackers win the right to continue their hack one day a week. We balance the total number of hacks in flight based on the staffing level of each department whose members are participating. This creates more competition in some departments than others, but that is okay.

We run hackathons every two months, not quarterly. Each hack team currently in flight competes side-by-side with the new hacks in an effort to make it to the next round and continue their work. With each successive round, teams are required to provide more demanding evidence (by hook or by crook — anything goes!) that their idea will create high levels of engagement, viral growth, and retention. If this cannot be shown to our executives’ satisfaction, the team is eliminated from the contest (although they can return on their own at any future competition, or their work can be picked up by other teams).

We haven’t been doing this for very long, so I’ll report back in a few months to share how how it has been going. Early signs are promising. The hope is that after a few rounds, concepts will emerge that we’re confident enough to invest in full-time as separate shots. At that point, the hack team transitions into a dedicated team with an appropriate ownership structure.

A Company Culture of Tinkerers

The ultimate goal in reinventing the hackathon is to create a systematic process for generating new growth businesses that avoids the problems with the top-down approach outlined in Part 1. But there’s a broader perspective that I think is at least as important, and that’s to transform engineering culture into a “culture of tinkerers”.

Tinkering is where serendipity lives, and any organization that makes it a core value will reap rewards across every level of their operations — in the creativity of enhancements to core products, in employee satisfaction, and in product options for future growth. This is how Nature does it. It doesn’t look like the tail of a Bell Curve we showed in Part 1. It looks more like the foraging behavior of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. In statistics, this kind of distribution is called Lévy Flight.

Postscript

I wrote this post four years ago. So what happened? We discovered how to combine social live video with our online dating apps. We pivoted the company to social live video entertainment, got acquired, and built a new $75M business from scratch in 18 months.