Customer love makes Personio go around

A look at Personio’s Hacka10 event that added value for our customers

Heart-shaped balloons, chocolates and dinners. What does that mean? Well, here in Personio it means a Hackathon event. Or, in our case the Hacka10 event. The idea first took roots from our business goal to reach the 10 million annual recurring revenue (#10MARR) mark. It all started around a meeting table with five of the organizing members and what came out of that meeting was a two day hacking event to bring forward a rapid customer value addition which we themed as “Customer Love” (after all it was Valentine’s Day).

Cross-Functional Teams is the way to go!

Even before the event started we had ideas pouring in. In the end we were looking at 15 great ideas put forward by teams consisting of members from different roles in the company making this a truly cross functional event. Having an idea was not enough though. To add concrete value to the 10MARR they needed to be ideas that could be completed and implemented in two days. This meant guiding each idea to an accomplishable goal using resources from every department in Personio.

Since we have a very transparent working style, it is easy for cross-team collaborations enabling the teams to constitute members from different departments. This ensured the end products had a more holistic approach. What better time than the Hacka10 to meet your colleagues?

What were the awards?

To end this productive and fun event we felt we must incentivize it for our hard working teams. So, we introduced five Hacka10 awards:

Code Wizards - What’s a cool product without its code. Only a code written like a poem, well structured and beautiful, would win this.

Steve would be jealous - As the award’s name suggests, the feature that wins this would have the best user experience and interface.

Hacka10 Masters - This award would be a winner in the “people’s” eyes. A popular-voting mechanism would determine the outcome.

Rainmakers - It is not a #10MARR event if we are not looking at the business side of things. The target is to reach a monetary goal and a solution or feature needed to win that.

HR Heroes - Personio is an HR tool, only a feature that rocked an HR team’s socks off would win this.

And the award goes to…

Global Search

For Steve Would Be Jealous & Codewizards

A double whammy! This team redesigned and implemented a beautiful new global search component for Personio. This means our users’ search results were much more informative and organised.

Project Based Attendance tracking

For Hacka10 Masters

An MVP of the project was created based on attendance tracking which allows the customer to create projects and assign them to an attendance period. This assigned project is also then exportable into a report format making it easy for the user to keep track of their projects.

DATEV LODAS export

For Rainmakers

With this project the customer is able to generate a file in DATEV LODAS ASCII format containing some employee master data using our payroll api. This is the foundation to develop the DATEV exports further and include more payroll related data.

Interviews for today

For HR Heroes

This widget on the dashboard was a valuable tool for the HR customers. This means they can keep track of their interviews for today and get valuable information on the go.

What did we learn from showing so much customer love?

A successful event has a lot of moving parts that needs to be oiled and maintained for it to run. Organizing this event we learnt some key points for further successful hackathons.

• Things “can” get done in such 2-day events and it is ok if it is a little rough around the edges
• Make the event available for all. Cross platform projects and participants highly enrich the outcomes and results.
• Keep the event in a space that is social and does not replicate your usual work space. This greatly impacts the mindset of all participants.
• The challenge is always to win everyone’s hearts in the company to even have such an event. It takes one good event to win them over.
• Branding your event can go a long way. For Personio it means a future for more such events under the same umbrella. And not to mention merchandizing helps spread the word on social media.

Since the success of the event we are looking at more future hackathons that will help us boost our customer satisfaction and also increase team collaboration.

Does Personio sound like a good working environment for you too? We have more than 50 job openings and would be happy to have you on board for our next hackathon.