Make Week 2023 Recap

Last month, nearly 200 Thumbtackers across the company came together for our annual week-long hackathon — Make Week. Since its inception, Make Week has been a driver for creativity, collaboration and innovation. Contributors across various teams work to bring passion projects to life that propel our organization’s vision forward and ultimately improve our technology.

The highlight of the event, Friday’s Make Week Fair, concluded the week with many teams presenting their ideas to a panel of six incredible judges — Marco Zappacosta (Co-founder & CEO), Nikhil Bobde (Chief Technology Office), P.J. Linarducci (Chief Product Officer), Lauren Porter (Senior Director, Head of Design), Shelton Mar (VP, Engineering) and Jack Erb (Senior Director, Operations Data Science) who voted on the best projects to win prizes across a number of categories. One special award category, the People’s Choice Award, relied on Thumbtackers to submit their winning vote. While all of the awards were notable and fun, one of the most rewarding aspects of Make Week is how Thumbtackers’ projects are brought to life in the months to come.

A Record-Setting Year

This year’s Make Week was truly record-setting! We had the most presentation pitches of any year — 68. From there, completed projects gave presentations with 4 winning teams being awarded prizes. This year’s award categories were:

• Most Visionary Product Evolution
• Most “Ship it Now” Impact
• Best Employee Experience Improvement
• People’s Choice

Here’s What Thumbtackers Had to Say about Make Week

Vineet Baldwa (he/him), Staff Software Engineer

Make Week at Thumbtack was an amazing experience. It let me think outside the box and come up with a new product idea that could deliver immediate impact to the company. I was able to work with a scrappy team of 4–5 people and really focus on delivering a feature with a live demo that made it easy for people to follow along. Since our project was addressing a direct need of consumers and pros, we are planning to prioritize it as a real feature very soon!

Sophia Bussey (she/her), Software Engineer

For me, Make Week was a great opportunity to meet and work with people on different teams. Our search-related project has also provided a great stepping stone towards working to make the project a reality at Thumbtack. It has been a great help in inspiring the architecture for our first experiment that will be implementing this form of search. Also, hearing about everyone’s Make Week projects was a huge inspiration/help for generating planning ideas for the next half of the year.

Ambles Kwok (he/him), Sr. Director, Engineering

The massive attendance at this year’s Make Week filled me with excitement. The addition of so many at this year’s event surpassed previous records in several aspects, including the highest number of teams and participants — it was remarkable. Additionally, the judges faced a considerable challenge in selecting the winners; all the ideas presented were truly remarkable, resulting in an extended deliberation period.

Our 2023 Make Week Award Winners

Now, for this year’s winners (drumroll please) …

Most Visionary Product Evolution:

• Harrison Chun, Divya Mandyam, Erin Hogan, Ryan Tolentino, Jesse Stauffer, Benjamin Sam

Most “Ship it Now” Impact:

• Abhilash Arora, David Kim, James Chan, Oleksandr Pryimak, Domi Jin, Sophia Bussey, Ashwini Patil, Cinthia Konichi Paulo, Lasya Boddapati, Jorge Suarez Jimenez, Prudhvi Gadiraju, Tim Huang

Best Employee Experience Improvement:

• Kamal Acharya, Teck Liew, Jay Patel, Raji Reddy, Brian Terczynski, Tu Vu, Frank Walsh

People’s Choice:

• Vineet Baldwa, Fardeen Meeran, Charles Liao, Julio Garcia, Matty Bow, Prachi Pundeer

Final Remarks

This year’s Make Week couldn’t have been possible without the contributions and efforts of Thumbtackers across our Engineering, Product, Data Science, Design teams and more! We want to thank everyone for their creativity and hard work put into making our annual Make Week a huge success. We’re definitely inspired by all of the ideas and projects showcased. Several projects have already shipped into production; propelling our vision to create a new era of home care forward.

Interested in participating in Make Week? Join our team! Check out our current openings at thumbtack.com/careers.