Go Bold Day — Mercari’s Internal Hackathon
“GO BOLD” is one of our three core values at Mercari. To live up to this value, our Product & Engineering organizations dedicate special days each quarter to drop what we’re working on and get out of our comfort zone. For two full days, we experiment with new ideas and technologies. We call this initiative Go Bold Day (GBD), and the results are always fascinating!
Participation provides our team members with opportunities to hone important soft skills:
- Teamwork: Work with teammates from other teams, who don’t yet know each other very well, and become trusted colleagues through the process.
- Sense of urgency: As a Silicon Valley startup, we’re always competing with the best companies, so it’s helpful for our team to feel the urgency for building the best product that’ll allow us to win in the US market.
- Recency: Tinker with new technologies and stay up-to-date with the latest platform APIs and frameworks.
- Presentation: Pitch your idea and demo your creation on stage in front of an audience.
And last, but most importantly:
- Go Bold: Test crazy ideas that otherwise might be overlooked or passed on, due to risk or a variety of unknowns (e.g. ROI).
Putting “Go Bold” into action
GBD follows a relatively simple formula:
- Pitching ideas
- Forming teams
- Time to hack
- Demos
- Winners’ ceremony
To illustrate how this all plays out, we’d love to tell you about our most recent Go Bold Day.
So… what happened on June 27th, 2018? It seemed like any other Wednesday — but for us at Mercari, it wasn’t!
We arrived to the office in the morning and gathered in the main hub area. I still recall how peoples’ faces were lighting up as Jonathon, our Program Manager and QA department head, announced the official launch of “Go Bold Day”.
Pitching Ideas
Everyone from engineers, product managers, and even our CEO, lined up in anticipation of their one minute of glory; one by one, they approached the stage to pitch their projects — innovative ideas that could significantly contribute to taking our marketplace to the next level. Well, except for a few questionable ideas that engineers wanted to build for fun. 😜
All of the ideas varied in nature — from new software features to physical, logistic-heavy solutions — to make both selling & buying on Mercari as simple as it can get.
As an example, here is one of our team’s ideas from our most recent GBD that ultimately didn’t make the cut for getting built:
3D Photo Capture
Whenever you want to sell a secondhand item on any marketplace app or website out there, the process requires you to take a few photos of the item — but that doesn’t give buyers the ability to fully inspect the item before buying it. It can be difficult to fully trust the condition of a used item, and this needs to be improved.
One of our team members thought about this idea: what if we allow sellers to take a collection of photos of the item from specific angles that we then convert into a 3D model, which could then be easily inspected from any angle?
This was too large of a moonshot to accomplish in just two days of hacking, but is the kind of idea that we love seeing our teammates generate during Go Bold Day!
Forming Teams
Once everyone pitched their ideas, it was time to form teams. This happened organically — people interested in an idea would start a conversation with the idea owner and join the team if their skills matched what the team needed. Once a team was formed, teams then reserved conference rooms to refine their ideas, discuss implementation details, and delegate tasks.
Time to Hack
What followed was two full days of concentration. Teams locked themselves inside conference rooms to get to business. Each person on a team had a specific role and was eager to perfect their part to ensure their collective success. By the end of those two days, teams developed a prototype (or MVP) of their idea paired with a pitch deck.
Demos
T-0: Time’s up! Everybody finished up with what they were working on and all eyes focused on the stage. Each team had 5 minutes to demonstrate what they had been working on for the past 48 hours. After going through a slide deck to convince the audience of the importance of their idea, each team provided a LIVE demo and this is where things got interesting!
Our expectations of demos are realistic, especially for a hackathon. Statistically speaking, live demos don’t always go smoothly — simulators crash, expected results differ from reality — but sometimes (with a bit of luck), it all works like a charm! We’re also aware that the solutions we develop at GBD are not production-ready. In most cases, engineers need to refactor or even rewrite that feature before confidently releasing it to the public.
Check out some of the ideas that have been demo’ed by our team:
First Photo Suggestion
The most powerful piece of information about an item you’re selling is its first photo. As we all know, a photo is worth 1,000 words and you only have one chance at nailing a first impression; that photo says a lot about the item’s condition and it has a huge psychological impact on the buyer’s will to purchase.
Because of this, in the early days of Airbnb’s mission to create a C2C marketplace for lodging, they would send a photographer to your house to take great professional photos, which increased booking rates exponentially.
In Mercari’s case, as a C2C marketplace for secondhand items, we need a way to help our sellers display their items in the most appealing way possible. This is where some of our engineers decided to geek out and take on the mission of determining which of the numerous photo you post about an item is the best to be placed first! This might seem like an easy task for sellers to do, but according to our data, most users are either amateurs or not aware of the impact of the first photo.
Instant Listing
It’s a well-known fact in e-commerce that buying is dead-simple, but selling is quite complicated.
This is why we, at Mercari, decided to take on the challenge to make selling easier than buying.
Right now, you can buy an item on Mercari with one click. To sell, however, you need to fill out what we internally call “The Immigration Form”, which is a long list of information about the item — starting with item photos, proceeding to title and description, and then item category and brand.
What if we could automatically detect most of that information?
Our product and engineering teams created multiple approaches to solve this challenge:
The first one was as simple as scanning the barcode or QR code of an item; lots of items have those codes on their boxes that can be matched against the original product, which we use to pre-fill all the item information details.
A second approach is using image detection — the premise here is that you could take a photo of the item and then our Machine Learning model would identify the product, match it against the original, and generate the relevant information for as many fields as possible.
Instant Purchase
Hot items vanish quickly, so buyers are always looking to snatch a good deal.
If you’re searching for “iPhone XS” on Mercari — which is considered a hot item in 2019 — you’ll get a list of all the available relevant items on the platform. Then, when you find the particular iPhone XS that you like — great condition, exact color & storage capacity you want — it might be above the price range you were hoping for. In this case, all you need to do is tap the 💙 button, and we’ll notify you when the seller drops the price.
On the other side of the equation, we provide a “promote” feature to sellers. With one tap, the item’s price is reduced by 10% and it’s bumped to the top of relevant search results, so that more prospective buyers see it. Our data shows that when sellers promote their items, they usually sell very quickly.
At the moment, we send a push notification to all buyers who liked this specific item informing them about the price drop. With this idea, they would be able to instantly buy the item from the push notification itself.
These were just a few of the ideas we came up with. There were plenty of other ideas, including non-product features — and a few features we’d like to keep under wraps, for now. 😉
Winners’ Ceremony
After all the demos are done, everyone in attendance gets the chance to vote for their favorite demo overnight. The next morning, the whole company gathers to celebrate the winner(s), and that team receives our custom-made trophy and gets bragging rights until the next Go Bold Day!
Go Bold Day is all about enabling our engineers to innovate. To celebrate that, our CTO, Mok Oh, collaborates with our law firm to identify all patentable ideas and work closely with the teams to convert their ideas and prototypes into actual IP.
And we don’t stop there — our VP of Product, Shida Schubert, with the help of his team, runs with high-impact ideas from Go Bold Day to get them production-ready. In fact, our recently revamped Help Center was born out of Go Bold Day!
And That’s a Wrap!
At Mercari, we’re all about empowering & growing our engineers. We provide numerous opportunities and events to cater toward achieving that goal; to mention a few, you can unleash your creativity at Go Bold Day, speak at conferences, publish articles on our engineering blog, and contribute to our open source libraries.
We have 7 engineering teams: iOS, Android, Web, Backend, Machine Learning, Data Engineer, and SRE, and we’re always looking for smart engineerings to join us; check out our open positions at mercari.com/careers.
Big thanks to Jonathon who fully reviewed and polished this article.
Resources
This article was originally delivered as a talk at Mercari Tech Conf (MTC) 2018 in Tokyo.
MTC is a technology conference introducing the future business direction and the technological challenges of the companies of the Mercari Group to fellow engineers.
The theme of MTC 2018 (was) Evolution. At this second annual conference we (introduced) how the Mercari Group has evolved over the past year, and the changes yet to come.
You can find all the talks from MTC on our YouTube channel here.
Here are some related MTC talks you might enjoy:
About the author
Dani Arnaout is an engineering manager at Mercari, focused on building a strong global engineering team. He is a world-renowned software engineer due to his many contributions on tech blogs, tech talks, and his mentorship at hackathons. His side venture, Abstract Layer — the programming AI that automates software development, landed him on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 2018 list in Enterprise Technology.
