The Valassis hackathon initiative
By Aimee Shaughnessy
What is a Hackathon?
Our quarterly hackathon is a two-day event intended to give people a chance to work on something they wouldn’t ordinarily get to. For engineering, this may look like talking to someone outside their team; or more realistically, just talking to somebody, anybody. For data science, this may mean dabbling in some code or researching a project not related to their everyday work. For sales, it could be coming up with a new technical solution for a client that we do not currently provide.
The hackathon initiative at Valassis was originally created with engineers in mind; to give them time to flex their creative brain and do something out of the ordinary. As word spread (and it spread fast!), all other facets of the Valassis organization wanted to be a part!
· We had sales asking engineering if they could implement a solution they had heard clients asking about.
· Engineering and data science came up with ways to better understand the data we own.
· Business analysts partnered with engineering to help local non-profits by building technical solutions for their manual processes.
· And engineering and product worked together to raise awareness for missing children with a technological solution the business already owned!
We created some friendly competition and defined categories for judging projects: Biggest Impact to the Business, Biggest Impact to the Community, Best Idea from a Diverse Team, and Crowd Favorite.
Why do we do a Hackathon?
We do it to make a difference. We want to make a difference, not only in our communities, but in our associates as well.
Our engineering leadership started this initiative knowing that engineers are inherently creative people and they wanted to let that creativity loose. They realized after engineers were given these couple of days every quarter to hack away at a problem they were truly passionate about, that the associates came back refreshed and ready to tackle the quarter ahead. We’re making a difference in our local and national communities, too.
Many engineers like to use this time to create new tools to make their lives easier. We often see projects that automate a manual or tedious process. One recent project tried to make it easier to analyze the petabytes of data that is stored in parquet file format on our Hadoop clusters. Parquet is a very efficient storage format, but it is often difficult to understand if there are ways to further optimize the storage usage. One of our senior engineers created a tool to help teams easily visualize their storage usage and how they can optimize further.
Another idea came about when we noticed a way to further our long- standing partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Valassis has been raising money for the organization since 1985 and partnered with NCMEC to start “50 in 50” and “Have You Seen Me?” with the goal of bringing missing children home. We assembled a group for the hackathon to look for a way to leverage our digital infrastructure to make a difference. Sometimes when we try to show an ad something goes wrong and the creative that we want to show isn’t available or is blocked. Instead of showing a blank image we have historically shown a public service announcement for ready.gov. The hackathon project changed the creative to the use the “Have You Seen Me” logo. This change alone will generate 90 million impressions every year to help raise awareness of missing children. In addition, with our recent changes to viewability, these impressions are highly viewable and likely to be seen by an end user.
What makes the Hackathon successful?
Giving people the freedom to think and act creatively allows them to enjoy their work even more. We give our associates the freedom every quarter to show their creativity, passion, and skills in a way that they want. We do not force projects on people or teams, but rather let individuals come up with ideas they think will make them, their community, or the business better. Once we hit our stride with the planning and execution of hackathon, we noticed that it’s something people think and talk about throughout the quarter; they actually look forward to it!
It’s Valassis’s way of saying “we value your creativity and will constantly strive to find outlets to tap into that valuable resource.”
