Hack the SDA SE
At SDA SE, we believe being part of the company is a crucial thing. Sometimes, you just need to stop your daily activities, take a deep breath and step back a little to look at the bigger picture from a different angle.
To make time and space for this, we have started our Hack the SDA event where we encourage every single SDA SE employee to be part of it. The rules are quite simple:
- every six weeks all employees are free to join
- if you join, you’re dismissed from all your daily tasks
- it is a safe space where you work on one SDA SE related topic
- all SDA SE employees meet in person in our beautiful building at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg to collect ideas and work together on further developing them.
Having such an event physically in our office increases dialogue and communication, which is important for an inspiring and creative atmosphere. And at the end it just feels good to meet different people in person, also and especially the ones which you usually would not work with in your daily work.
What kind of ideas are handled at this day?
Glad you ask. This is the most important part about it. At SDA SE we encourage everyone to be part of our daily business. If there is a need or an issue which the company should know about, then it should be addressed. If an issue is not solvable on your own, then try to gather the right people around you to solve it together. If you see the chance of ownership, take it. Or in short Act like an owner
Since this is one of our core values, we try to give everyone the chance to change or develop something outside of the daily routine. No Jira tickets, no PO to talk to, no customer request to fulfil. Just your own motivation.
And how would this Hack the SDA day look like in detail?
The day starts with a nice breakfast where everyone joining into the event has to change to meet and mingle. After having a good start into this day, its meetup time at our atrium where all ideas, which have been submitted prior to the actual event, are displayed on our walls. It’s then pitching time for every submitter. You get five minutes to summarise your need and intention to the group. Once all ideas have been shared, everyone taking part in this even then decides where they want to participate.
And this is the exciting part. Since we want to address all employees at SDA SE, but not all of us are having a developer background, some ideas are not technical at all. Other ideas may evolve into something bigger while they are pitched because colleagues from other departments bring another perspective into it and the idea evolves into something new.
At the end the sky is the limit. But with such an open mindset in place of course some minimal compliances should be made. Here are the very few, but essential ground rules for the ideas that can be submitted for the event:
- The idea and the taskforce forming around it need to have some loose relation to the company needs. For example, pitching the idea to build the next free to play Android game would not find a common sense at SDA SE.
- Each idea, which was worked on in a taskforce formed on that day, is presented at the end of the day. The most important questions to be answered then are: What have you done? What have you achieved? Is there a POC you want to demonstrate or some other output?
And thats basically it. The rest is totally up to the people.
We just started with this format, and we already noticed some promising progress, so let’s give you some examples:
One thing we started was building a committee, which takes care about how we enhance our office space. How can we make our environment even more cosy for everyone? Do we need more breakout rooms? What about phone booths? What about plants or decoration? How about table tennis instead of a kicker table?
And since we’re also a software company we also dealt with a lot of technical ideas like building a new Backstage Widget, which aggregates and automates information out of Jira using through the REST API. Or we programmed a Slack Bot which automatically warns you when the weather conditions are getting bad to or from the way to the office to plan in enough time (& right clothing) for your way to and from work.
At the end the message is quite simple: Establishing something like this within the company invites all of us to grow and participate into SDA SE. And since it’s a recurring event every six weeks, we have the time to invest further into a POC or try out something completely different at the next meeting.
We might just have started the next big thing which slowly grows from a small POC into another great product ready to conquer the world. All what is needed is just a good idea and a motivated task force to try it out.
