Freeletics Spike Week Goes Remote

What the Heck is Spike Week?

Twice a year at Freeletics, we host our “Spike Week” event. Spike Week is an internal hackathon where team members from different departments at Freeletics come together to solve a variety of user problems or work on internal projects. In most cases, the winning team’s idea is integrated into the app or the company. Sitting at the heart of Freeletics culture, Spike Week is one of the best times for anyone to feel the passion, teamwork and camaraderie which brings people together throughout the company.

This year, our Spike Week was planned for the week of March 16th. However, the week before it quickly became clear that the event could not go ahead as initially planned. With all Freeletics employees encouraged to begin working from home just before Spike Week, we had to make the last-minute decision to either postpone the event or host it completely remotely. For the first time. We boldly chose the latter, not sure just how it would turn out. We had never planned a remote event before, let alone one that last for a whole week and requires so much creativity and collaboration between 165 team members. This didn’t put us off and we quickly turned the traditional setup into a fully digital one.

To make this a successful event, our Spike Week hosts from the Engineering team, Frank Hermann, and Agile Coach, Elena Popretinskaya, organized everything from structuring the teams to communicating everything in the right way, and in general being a helpful resource for remote work. Lena was very positive about the event. “In every situation, there is an opportunity. Together as a company, we set our minds to make this into something more than just trying to cope with the situation. It was beautiful to see how people are finding their way to make the best out of the suddenly remote collaboration.”

How did it come together

Planning and Communication:

One of the biggest challenges for smooth communication was to create collaboration guidelines to help the team work together in a remote and digital setting. Here are some of our general recommendations:

• Slack Channels: Create a Slack channel for everyone participating in the event as well as a channel dedicated to each team and project.
• Virtual Team Rooms: Use Google Hangouts to ideate the project at first, and then use it as a “room” for the team over the week, where everyone can jump in and out at any time.
• Clear Deadlines: Define clear dates and timelines for each stage of the entire event from team forming to ideation and final presentations.
• Use the Right Tools: Good collaboration starts with the right tools. The teams were enabled through different collaboration tools to help them ideate, present and communicate is a seamless manner. Top tools included Miro, Figma, Noom Screen Recording, Squadcast and Loom.

Team Spirit!

The Spike Week organisation team did a phenomenal job of engaging the individual teams and keeping them motivated and living the Freeletics spirit. The week started with a general idea pitching session, in which everyone who had an idea was able to pitch it to the entire company. Afterwards, people would choose their favorite project and join the team. In total, we had 13 teams and a total of 73 participating team members across all Freeletics departments.

But work is nothing without fun — especially during this special week. Some of the activities that helped people get into the hacking mood included a virtual coffee room, Spotify listening parties in Google Hangouts and even a “Drawful Lunch Break” hosted by Monica, one of our Engineering Managers. The week would not have been the same without these creative social events.

And the Winner is…

On the demo day, the project teams were well-organised with the proper technical setup and time management during the presentation process. Everyone in the organisation participated and teams were thrilled to showcase their work.

The demo presentations were very engaging — we used Google Hangouts so everyone could be involved, and the team was encouraged to use the chat function to ask questions, share opinions or praise the efforts of the teams.

Each project team had a representative who presented the entire idea starting with the initial concept to eventually showcasing their results. While we can‘t say much about the specific projects, they covered a wide range of topics from better utilizing fitness analytics to improving user experience within the app. All presentations were properly recorded so anyone who couldn’t join the session could check them out in retrospect.

Takeaways

The remote Spike Week experience was a meaningful one for everyone at Freeletics. It showed that the team was very passionate about working on projects that can positively impact our product, drive user retention and make our users happier. One of the key learnings for making a remote Spike Week successful was that our people were taking responsibility and ownership and were supporting each other to accomplish the mission they were working on. One team member insightfully mentioned that “in person, the week is definitely more lively. However, we could still feel the great energy in the “room,” even remotely. I loved the final presentation and the fact that everyone could share thoughts directly in the chat, that was truly awesome.”

As a follow-up from the demo day, the Product team has already reached out to the participating teams to check which projects can be worked on soon and to align on what needs to be prioritised or further developed as part of the product roadmap.

While the entire team is certainly excited to collaborate in person again in the future, it was evident that all involved were happy to have the opportunity to go ahead with a remote version of their beloved Spike Week. Another team member commented that “seeing all the remote people together and still living the Freeletics spirit together is priceless.” There is no doubt that we will continue to work as one team and keep our proactive communication alive, no matter where we are.

Thanks to everyone involved in Spike Week for making it such a success and for sharing your thoughts with us.