WorkLabs: Surprising ways Hack Week was positively impacted by the new reality of distributed work
Let’s just tell it like it is: at Dropbox, we have some of the most creative, innovative, and skilled people in the tech industry on our teams. And we believe it’s important to give them space to roam, flex those muscles, and create solutions to the everyday challenges they face at work — which is where Hack Week comes into play.
Every year, Dropboxers around the world take a week off from their normal work duties to focus on bringing their best “someday” ideas to life instead. This year, our first fully distributed Hack Week was themed around “working from the cloud,” and we saw a record number of projects submitted. In our current fully distributed work environment, with office walls broken down and everyone on the same playing field, Dropboxers were able to collaborate from across the globe on a greater scale than ever before — and the results were incredible. Here are our main findings:
- The spirit of innovation is high, even while working in a virtual environment.
- We make work human by solving problems that we, as Dropboxers, and our customers have in a distributed world.
- We go beyond boundaries to forge meaningful connections at Dropbox.
- Innovation is not just writing code. We have innovations from every part of the company.
One reflection of this increased cross-collaboration was visible in our Better Together award, which went to the DRL/Customers team this year. This group stretched across both organizational and physical boundaries, with representation from engineering, communications, customer experience, and marketing, as well as our San Francisco, Sydney, and Seattle offices.
This team identified a common problem for many Dropboxers, regardless of their role or location: where do you go to find comprehensive information about customers? So they created a one-stop source of truth for all things Dropbox customer-related, which includes customer stories, feedback, data, information on events, and much more.
The team said, “We had Hack Week teammates located in Sydney, Seattle, and San Francisco, and we found new ways to get the team bonding, including personalized Zoom backgrounds and a collaborative Spotify playlist to dance to. We had a goal of going live with an internal customer resource center in less than five days, and we used daily standups and a dedicated Slack channel to keep us close.”
But Hack Week isn’t just for customer- or product-related innovations — many projects are purely internal and benefit more than just business. In our Make (Distributed) Work Human category, several teams took on initiatives to create a comprehensive toolkit to support distributed work, or to remove any language with non-inclusive roots from our codebase, product, and processes. The winning team, Project Satellite, took our company directory and turned it into a product that is essentially an encoding of our company culture.
Said the team, “Since work from home began, it’s been harder than ever to truly bond with your teammates. We’ve been doing our best with virtual coffee chats and zoom trivia, but it’s obvious our interactions are more transactional and team camaraderie is waning. This problem is exacerbated as you expand beyond your core team to other coworkers. It’s difficult to figure out who’s necessary just to get things done, albeit try to form a more meaningful relationship with them. Project Satellite is the place to learn not only who owns what, but where and when they work, who they are, what they are interested in, and what they aspire to be. With Project Satellite you’ll not only have the insight to know who to go to to get stuff done, but a springboard to facilitate meaningful, impactful collaboration — even in quarantine.”
Our 2020 Grand Prize went to a project team that was exceptionally forward-thinking in their work — and aimed to eliminate another problem that plagues Dropboxers across the world. They focused their energies on the challenge of organizing and prioritizing communication and notifications across all the tools we use: Dropbox Paper, Slack, Gmail, Google Slides, Figma, Trello, and just about everywhere else. Especially during distributed work, which poses new levels of distraction for a lot of us, it was easy to get many Dropboxers on board.
As team member Jay Stakelon said, “I think there were a couple of things that helped us as a team achieve a successful outcome during Hack Week. The project itself was ‘riding a wave’ of both latent and overt strategic interest from various teams and organizations across Dropbox. It touched on initiatives across teams and coalesced them into a single proof-of-concept with a project goal and intent that was crisply articulated and easily internalized, with simple success criteria.
When we kicked off, we shared our own individual motivations for working on Hack Week and our own learning goals with one another. We all have unique strengths and motivations, and hearing about them, at least for me, helped me get closer, faster, to the people that in most cases I didn’t know before the week started. It also helped me understand why each person was taking their time and investing their energy as part of the team, and for all of us to think of each other as not ‘just a designer’ or ‘just an engineer’ but as multifaceted people with interests and valuable inputs beyond our chosen function.”
Just as Hack Week was positively impacted in surprising ways by the new reality of distributed work, so have we seen an increased spirit of inclusivity across our company. You can learn more about these new benefits in this article.
