Our Guide to Hosting an Amazing Hackathon
Maintaining a fun and creative culture is vitally important to everyone at Property Finder. From design to DevOps, we believe that creativity comes in all manner of guises and we recently hosted a Hackathon to allow teams across Product, Data and Tech to show off their skills and ideas.
A Hackathon should be an exciting event for all in a company, not only those in product and tech — it enables us to imagine and experience what the future could be like in a very hands-on way over a period of just one or two days. It’s also a way for the team to show off skills that they may not have the opportunity to in their regular day jobs, and can be a motivating and engaging event. Following a whirlwind couple of days, we ended up with 13 teams presenting a wide range of solutions to B2B, B2C and internal process challenges.
We followed up with a feedback survey to all involved, and have gathered this into our top tips for anyone considering hosting
Senior Leadership Buy-In
The entire Property Finder Product, Tech and Data teams taking a whole day off to join the Hackathon is no small investment by the company, especially with our ambitious growth plans and agile working nature.
Following discussions with our colleagues across the teams, we believed that a common motivating factor was to work on impactful products that would help the business (rather than working on an unrelated project for the Hackathon). Fortunately the leadership saw the value in the exercise, and our follow-up survey supported our hypothesis.
The survey results suggested that as well as the obvious motivation of having fun (who doesn’t want to have fun at work!?), there was a very high value placed on building prototypes that can have a commercial and tangible business impact.
This seems like a good opportunity to thank Michael, Dominic, Anu, Giri and Yi Wei for their ongoing support and constructive input to #PFHack2019!
Points mean Prizes!
Another learning from our previous event; last year’s Hackathon saw only one formal award. We felt this didn’t represent the breadth of effort made by the teams, so we expanded the scope to five prizes:
- Grand Prize
- Most Immediately Useful / Shippable Award
- Most Daring Award
- Most Hardcore Hackathon Team
- People’s Choice Award
We decided to present trophies to the winning teams, so they could be proudly displayed after the event, as well as a cash prize for the grand prize winners.
Time is of the Essence
The ideal length of a Hackathon is a hot topic for debate. Some companies in a similar field dedicate an entire week (Trulia) whereas some commit two or three days (Zoopla).
Given the stage of our company and with respect to the fact that this is a new initiative which we are testing and iterating on, we decided to keep the Hackathon to just one full working day, with the option to continue over the weekend with presentations on Sunday (the Dubai working week is Sunday to Thursday for readers who are unaware!).
Our feedback survey suggested that we could reconsider this approach next time; one quarter of respondents wanted more time to work on their Hackathon project, and others suggested a formal cut-off time from which no further commits can be made to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’ effect over the weekend.
This is something we are definitely going to look into in the future!
To Theme or Not to Theme?
Whilst 2019’s Hackathon was technically themeless, we did have a guiding objective following leadership feedback from the previous year — can we include some measure of business value in the judging criteria?
We included a question about theming in the survey and got mixed results from a broad range of viewpoints. Amazingly 50% of respondents had an opinion on whether we should theme, and what that theme should be which has given us some exciting direction for the next event!
If you are looking for inspiration then thank the Property Finder engineering team for the below:
Specific to business
- People team initiatives
- Related to current objectives
- Personalisation
Internal Processes
- Data integrity
- Cyber security
Technology-specific
- Blockchain
- Machine Learning
Resolve a specific user problem
Social Hackathon
No theme at all!
Cross-functional to the core
I had to do a double-take when, mid-Hackathon, I looked over at one team of developers who were conducting a focus group with a selection of colleagues from the Finance and Legal teams.
In reality, I shouldn’t have been surprised that this naturally came to pass. Hackathons are, at their core, meant to bring a variety of people together to solve problems and, as this team demonstrated, this means reaching outside the tech and product team itself for new perspectives.
The next Hackaton will see us involve a wider range of stakeholders in the excitement of the Hackathon to provide new insight and viewpoints on how we can solve business problems efficiently and creatively.
Hype
The run-up to the Hackathon is a vital time to rally the troops, and get everyone’s creative juices flowing. Never underestimate the skepticism of a busy developer with one too many tasks hanging in JIRA!
We started to promote the event two weeks beforehand, encouraging colleagues to post their project ideas in a shared document where others could sign up to work on it with them. This led to a lot of back-and-forth between people that ordinarily wouldn’t work together.
Our wonderful marketing team also made some posters which we distributed around the office to keep everyone’s minds on the upcoming event.
Nourishment
As we expected some intense working days we arranged an abundance of food in the form of branded cupcakes and tasty pizzas and potato wedges
One of the more surprising findings from the Hackathon was that pizza is not, in fact, king:
The obvious key takeaway here is that next time we will make an effort to provide some more health-friendly options, but the cute cupcakes will definitely stay.
Working Remotely
Many companies have remote or distributed teams that are not able to make it to the HQ at the drop of a hat. This is an entire discussion in itself, but our challenge as the Hackathon organisation team was to make the remote teams feel as included and welcome as if they were here in person.
We did this by ensuring there would be some part-remote teams, with some PF-HQ based team members working online with our colleagues based elsewhere (Poland and Netherlands)
We ended up with two teams that had a remote element (mine was one of them!) and the overall feedback was very good. We especially enjoyed having our Poland-based colleagues joining the presentation on the big screen via Zoom!
Celebration and Ceremony
Celebrating success is a fundamental part of any successful company culture. We set aside a few hours for the presentation and awards ceremony to make sure it was done with a sufficient level of fanfare.
Each team had 5 minutes to present their work and take questions. Every single presentation was applauded and had a wide range of very engaged colleagues asking questions, or even imagining further developments!
Following a coffee break where the judges deliberated over what was undoubtedly a tough decision, awards were presented by our CEO Michael with some of the judge’s favourite elements of the project highlighted.
The ‘people’s choice’ award judging was undertaken via a Slack poll.
A Dedicated Organisation Team
Throughout the process we had an amazing team of volunteers from across Product and Tech who were committed to ensuring the Hackathon was a roaring success. A particular shout-out to Rose Marsh and Shoba Cardoza who were pivotal in the delivery of the event.
Having an on-site organisational team who are actively taking part in the day and maintaining momentum is vital for ensuring maximum participation and impact — they say you should lead by example!
Ship it… 🚀
This is next up for us! Last Hackathon saw two ideas move from PoC to product validation and we are hoping for an even greater success rate this time round. With senior-level buy in and so much hype around all of the ideas, we hope to use the Hackathon as a powerful launch pad for future Property Finder feature development.
Following this successful Hackathon we have decided to increase their frequencies to twice annually, so watch this space for future exciting Hackathon reports!
That’s it! Thanks for reading!
If you liked this article and want to be part of our brilliant team of engineers that produced it (and took part in the Hackathon), then have a look at our latest vacancies here.
A special thanks to Juha Jantunen for his wonderful photography used in this blog.
