Why I Love Hack-A-Thons and The 5 Reasons Your Company Should Implement Them
The Experience
It’s 2:00am in the morning. A handful of people sit amongst a pile of chips and salsa, Chinese food cartons, 85% dark chocolate bars, and bottled cold brew, banging away on their laptops and laughing while music blasts in the background.
I am there… potentially delirious but I am with my team so there is no going back.
We are due to present our features at 10:00am tomorrow along with two other teams. The theme was catering, and as a business building technology for the food production industry, we wanted to roll into trade show season (go away coronavirus) with some flashy new gadgets. We wanted to demonstrate our skills as an agile startup that can deliver value in a short amount of time.
The leadership team really wanted to express that this event was all about working on exactly what we wanted to work on, which meant…
No structure.
Work with a team or not.
Build exactly what you want to build.
How it works
The event begins with a pitch. If you have an idea, share it and communicate the kind of resources that you require to make that idea a reality. Maybe you can code but would love some marketing material to amp up your feature reveal, or a UI designer to handle the mockups. When the pitching is complete teams form and people get to work.
Participation was not limited to the USA… our remote Argentinian team was able to pitch ideas, join teams via Zoom, and lead the charge into the wee hours of the night.
In my group, we decided to build out an Event platform for catering companies to be able to create events and link those events to their existing menus. This would enable them to run event prep workflows like purchasing and food production batching.
One of the beautiful things that happened almost immediately was prioritization and scoping. The 24 hour time constraint forces people to define an MVP (minimum viable product) and throw out unnecessary tasks that can be peppered in as time allows. This was like a rapid self organization, spurred on by the energy of the event.
After organizing, the teams began to work. In between all the tasks teams were in constant communication. “Finished this feature, ready to merge in your work.” “Blocked by so-and-so’s feature, pivoting to this task.” Imagine if every day employees operated with that sort of game-time, event energy prerogative… Always asking, “Am I being as valuable as I can with my time right now?”
The Result
Our team ended up with a working MVP that is ready to have other powerful features laid on top of it. As a company we saw team-work, creativity, and enjoyment across the board.
Ultimately, people brought ideas into our application that had not existed before and were not on our roadmap. Part of the beauty of this event is that I now look at my teammates differently because they all had this unique opportunity to be creative and showcase a more raw representation of themselves and what they are good at.
The 5 Immediate Benefits
Team Bonding
One of the biggest things I noticed was cross-department team bonding. While a hack-a-thon may seem like a developer-centered event, in actuality the roles that marketing, customer success, and sales play is crucial in prepping for the feature launch.
Ponder this…
- When this feature lands is there material to teach customers how to us it?
- Is there an email release?
- Do any of these deliverables require media?
- How is this value communicated to future prospects?
The answers to these question and many more are all things that need to be done and can be worked on in parallel during the hack-a-thon. From a bonding perspective, communicating how the feature is going to look, how the feature is going to behave, and how the feature can be improved are opportunities for interfacing and collaborating with these other departments. This serves to strengthening the working relationship in a fun but focused environment.
In addition to cross-department there is cross-team bonding as well. Maybe a hack-a-thon team is composed of developers that you do not normally get to work with in the day-to-day. What a huge opportunity this is to learn more about them… where their strengths lie, and what their creativity capacity is. Also, it’s an opportunity to take the seriousness out of developing… to laugh, share stories, and get to know your team on a more personal level.
When the environment is working in smaller groups, you get a deeper window into who your coworkers are as people. Ultimately, being in the trenches, with the energy of the event, you form stronger working relationships and strengthen the organization as a whole.
Diverse Adaptation
The event is chaotic, and working with this chaos will expose you to challenges, forcing you to adapt in ways that are outside of the realm of standard process.
Potential stressors:
- Unknown requirements
- Tight deadline
- Lack of implementation details
- Getting out of sync with your team
- Problems that arise in unfamiliar territory
Growth happens on too many levels to enumerate because the stressors are more intense and more variable. When speaking about adaptation, variability is a beautiful thing and ensures you do not become an employee really good at one thing, and not so good at others.
Normally work with the UI? Put your DB shoes on and do some schema design, or your Backend hat and expose that data for the Frontend. Stepping out of your normal shoes and oiling some less traveled, neural pathways will benefit your skills as a developer and your ability to contribute in conversations across the full stack.
Change of pace.
Imagine working in an environment with heavy process. Four-week sprints leave you planning and producing in a very cyclical manner. While regularity is good for productivity and the roadmap, it can take its toll on those that are a part of the repetition. Mixing up the day-to-day, even with a short event, provides employees with a welcome breath of fresh air that helps stave off feelings of monotony.
Value to the Company
All the participants are rapidly developing product features that may or may not be on the company’s road map. Theses outlier features can deliver massive value to customers. While some of these features may not be on the direct road map it is important to remember that everyone has a bit of a different perspective on what can potentially add value. By opening up the floor to these ideas the company is empowering their employees to share their perspective on the product and where that product can provide more value to customers.
Creative Space
A single spark of creativity can give rise to a truly wondrous idea… Hack-a-thons provide that space for creativity without boundaries so that individuals and teams can build what they want, the way they want to build it. Rather than being handed a list of product requirements, teams are free to define the boundaries of their end user’s experience and the potential road map that will get them there.Through this, employees gain practice in defining product requirements and scoping their implementation accordingly. In the end, the finished product is the result of the team’s collective creativity… and that is a powerful thing.
Look at some of the other companies that turn to these events or offer similar benefits in order to provide creative freedom and build stronger teams.
- Blizzard
- Google (20% time)
- Procore Technologies
In Conclusion
Similar to fitness challenges or races (albeit more inclusive than these events), hack-a-thons inject energy and creativity while mixing up the standard flow and process of a company. All of these characteristics together provide an environment that catalyzes team-bonding and solidifies positive working relationships between coworkers, strengthening the company as a whole and propelling it forward toward its goals.
Start planning your first hack-a-thon today and see the results for yourself.
