Make Week 2022: Running a successful hackathon remotely
Byline: Richard Demsyn-Jones and Wynn Ahn
Since 2019, Make Week has been Thumbtack’s annual week-long hackathon. It’s an innovative week, spawning impressive projects that improve our technology and push forward our vision. Contributors from diverse job functions come together, often meeting each other for the first time, and put forth tremendous energy to bring their passion projects to life. We fit a lot into one week, with a kick-off on Monday morning and presentations in a Make Week Fair on Friday afternoon.
This year we recruited the leaders of our Engineering, Product, Analytics, and Design organizations as judges for our comprehensive prize categories:
- Best Customer Experience
- Best Professional Experience
- Best Employee Experience Improvement
- Best Home Focused Idea
- Best Growth Idea
However, we gave the power to the people to vote for one final prize category: the People’s Choice Award. All the projects presented this year have the potential to be impactful. The awards are fun, but the real reward is seeing how these projects will drive our product forward in the coming months and years.
We had 24 incredible projects that were presented, and one of our key priorities for this year was to ensure all projects received equal participation and excitement during presentations. Running a hackathon at our scale always poses challenges, but through open communication and leadership support we were able to make this Make Week a success. We want to highlight several tips that helped Make Week run smoothly.
Align with the company calendar as much as possible, and make it align with you
We like hosting these events at the start of the quarter, while everyone has high energy and so we can avoid pressure from projects that are approaching deadlines. We chose the second week of January to avoid some events in the first week and to let everyone return and settle in for a week after holidays.
Communicate early and often
We sent out context-setting emails starting in December, and then both before and during Make Week in January. We created a slack channel for the event, sharing information there and in large team channels. We also had brief slots in company-wide and engineering-wide meetings.
Room for improvement: not everyone keeps up with large slack channels or meetings on a daily basis, so in the future we plan to pitch Make Week in smaller team meetings or slack channels for higher engagement.
Get the pitch deck going ASAP
In the week before Make Week, we circulated a pitch deck where anyone participating could add a slide explaining their project, and anyone else could attach their name to the project and/or join its slack channel. On Monday of Make Week, we held a pitch session where each project originator gave an optional short pitch of what they wanted to build and what they needed help with. Most of the sign ups happened before the pitch session so that people maximized their time to plan and build ideas.
Get buy-in from senior leaders
Our CEO, Marco Zappacosta, has been a passionate judge of every Make Week, and this year was no exception. We also recruited leaders of our Engineering, Product, Analytics, and Design organizations as judges. All of these leaders bought in to their organizations participating in the hackathon and adjusted their regular work accordingly.
Involve a broad spectrum of the company
By having Engineering, Product, Analytics, and Design all involved, we had exciting cross-functional collaborations and a wide variety of projects. We were also clear that we welcomed participation from other organizations as long as those participants cleared the time commitment with their managers.
Get the crowd moving for presentations
One of the hardest challenges of a remote hackathon is to get people to check out all the amazing projects over Zoom. Back in the old days, we held physical fairs where people could easily and naturally flow in and out of various demos. In order to maximize the number of projects people could check out in a remote setting with limited time, we divided our presentation time into two sections: 1) lightning round presentations, and 2) rolling breakout demo rooms. In the lightning round, every presentation had two minutes to present to the entire audience. Then, during the rolling breakout rooms, we had five rounds where each observer could pick which of the five projects they wanted to get a closer look at and ask questions about.
Adapt the presentations to fit the number of projects
We contained the entire Make Week Fair to an hour and a half, keeping it short to encourage as much participation as possible, including from senior leaders. Ahead of it we had a sign-up sheet and reached out to teams, so we would know how many teams were presenting. We allocated lightning round duration, the number of breakout rooms, the number of breakout rounds, and the breakout session lengths accordingly. Then, we actually held ourselves to our schedule, with polite but firm moderation. While we still went 15 minutes over, all-in-all, we packed in an impressive amount of content and made sure every team had an equal opportunity to share their work.
Every year, our Make Week is full of excitement and energy, generating new ideas and projects that will push our marketplace to new heights. The logistics will only become more challenging as we grow, yet we continue to find ways to have high participation and to give every project a chance to shine.
If you found this exciting and want to participate in Make Week 2023, come join us!
