One hackathon a sprint
We ran an experiment at upday which I’d like to share with you because it was highly productive and even better — a lot of fun!
For ages we’ve had the idea to implement a read it later or bookmarking functionality in upday, which would allow our users to save a Top News or My News story to read later. We got in touch with external companies and brainstormed extensively — but in the end, the priority was never high enough to implement it.
One day the Android team was chatting about how much we’d love to see that feature implemented and agreed that it shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe we could come up with a “one day version” of that feature. This expression was actually coined by the guys from Basecamp in their awesome blog Signal vs. Noise. They are working in six week cycles and break down features in to “six week versions” or in other words, MVPs.
So, we came up with an idea:
Three of us spend one focused day — and simply do it. We are completely empowered to make all decisions on the fly.
To be as focused as possible, we decided to leave the office and work from a co-working space.
And what should I say, it worked really well! We started at Sankt Oberholz in Berlin (can’t recommend it too much) and then moved over to the next Starbucks. We found solutions for everything that we encountered along the way — translations were provided on the fly from our editors across europe, missing designs were created in realtime from us and everything that could be handled locally, was simply done — and it was great!
The feature will be live soon in the Play Store version of the app.
Actually, it worked so great that we now try to embedd this into every sprint:
- Identify a “one day version” of a feature
- Plan what you need
- Go out and come back the next day to show off :-)
The place isn’t so important, we ended up in a Starbucks that is embedded in a supermarket :-) Just good coffee and WiFi is important!
So, at the end you have “one hackathon a sprint”.
If you have questions about this — feel free to get in touch with me via Twitter and of course we are looking always for new updudes who wanna join us (upday jobs).
