Running a hackathon to work on solutions for Free School Meal Holiday Vouchers

Written: 7 September 2023 by Cheryl Cheung, Senior Service Designer

Internal hackathons are one of the fastest ways to build cross-team collaboration. When there are ideas drifting around, hackathons can be an excellent opportunity for people to take time together to focus and explore ideas in a fun and structured environment.

We recently organised one to work on possible solutions to respond to the Free School Meal Holiday Voucher service’s challenges.

We went into the hackathon with clear goals to:

• rapidly explore a proof of concept or viable solutions
• assess the work that needs to happen afterwards

We invited people from across service teams to contribute and bring their expertise. Expertise included:

• Advice and Benefits
• Product — Product management, development, service design and business analysis
• Data and technology

Planning to get the most out of the day

Before we get stuck into the hackathon, we prepared a few things to get the most out of the day including:

• brief documentation outlining the service context, current challenges and the user stories
• process maps of the current Free School Meal Holiday Voucher to show examples of how the service is currently managed
• an agenda filled with questions and activities to help people discuss the desired outcomes and come up with ideas on the day
• a Teams channel to help the team stay connected, store any of our documents and actions that may come out of Hackathon. This was because we knew the hack day would be a hybrid of in-person and online.

On the day

We structured our day with a morning to do a deep dive into the problem and an afternoon to focus specifically on coming up with ideas.

In the morning

We aimed to build a shared understanding of the problem, reminding everyone in the room of the background and context of the service and our objectives for the day.

We invited our service representative to demonstrate their day-to-day work in managing and administrating the Free School Meal Holiday Voucher.

We gave everyone prompts to think about from their perspectives including:

• what goals are the service try to achieve?
• what challenges do you see with the current service operations?
• what are the key considerations to improve the service operations?
• do you have any questions about the service you’d like clarification on?

These questions helped us have an in-depth discussion about the key goals, the challenge areas we wanted to address, and what to consider when coming up with ideas for them in the afternoon.

In the afternoon

We switched gear to focus our time on sketching out ideas and building concepts. We got attendees to first spend some time quickly drawing out as many ideas as they could, then have everyone pitch their ideas.

All of the ideas were stuck on the wall after each pitch, we then went around the room and voted silently on the 5 best ideas that addressed the key problems we identified.

We used 4 of those ideas as the basis for the next activity. We split people into 4 teams to work on the concepts they were most interested in. They then started to build out a more complete picture of each concept by describing:

• the general idea
• any additional details the idea involved such as tech requirement, user/data flow or process
• challenges it related to
• hypothesis and assumed outcome it would lead to

Once all the concepts were generated, all the attendees came back together to pitch it to the group again. This was to see if any concepts could be grouped into similar or overlapping work, or if any concepts should be prioritised to set-up a viable solution as quickly as possible.

We ended the Hackathon with a clear service structure and core capabilities that the solutions aimed to achieve. This enabled the group to go away to draft a work plan and what people and skills would be needed to work on the project.

Our learnings from hosting a Hackathon

The Hackathon brought an energetic vibe to our regular Friday and reminded us of some wider benefits of using this format to work together.

1. Fasten time needed to surface service challenges and bring AHA moments!

This is the first internal hackathon we held in the Product team. It turned out to be a productive way of working with service teams and aligning people’s thinking in a short amount of time.

When people’s daily work is in full swing, some service problems can slip through the cracks because no one fully understand the challenges and how to address them. The hackathon allows these to surface and extract tangible ideas for new solutions and processes that lead to better service experiences.

2. Being inventive together as one team

A hack day is a great opportunity for everyone to experience the burst of creativity and innovation when working on a challenge. This excites and motivates people to work together as one team.

Building things that improve services, with people from the services who you don’t usually work side by side daily, goes way beyond any team build exercises.

The deep insights that each person provide in the room help everyone to gain a whole new level of appreciation for each other’s work. It strengthened relationships and reminded everyone of what a great bunch of people they work with.

3. Fostering an innovative culture from ground up

“If you look at history, innovation does not come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”

- Steven Johnson, author of Where good ideas comes from

Hackathon is a safe space to fail without consequences. It helps everyone involved forget about boundaries for a moment and step out of their comfort zones. It takes a new lens to look at problem differently and try new things.

This type of experiences is a small step towards agile mindset and help encourage people to think openly and differently. All good ingredients that can massively impact people’s day-to-day work.