Forming Teams for VICE’s First Hack Week
Last month, we held VICE’s first Hack Week. Writers, editors, video operations managers, and analysts from across the company worked alongside our engineers, designers, and product managers to create prototypes to share at the end of the week.
On Friday afternoon, the last day of Hack Week, the group gathered for presentations on the bleachers of our Dumbo office. Even with only a week to make them, our teams presented well-considered ideas that evaluated new platforms, incorporated new technologies, and explored new user experiences.
One team presented a cheeky chatbot dubbed “VICE Buddy” that dished out snark in response to curse words, in addition to articles and videos based on requests. Another team experimented with machine learning algorithms to “read” articles and categorize them by topic, based on the words in the article. A third tackled a visually-driven feed that served up podcasts, stories, and videos into a flow that broke out of a standard grid.
From our ten teams, there wasn’t a weak presentation in the lot. Our goals for the week were to make space to explore new ideas, break everyone out of their day-to-day routines, introduce people who hadn’t worked together, and to have fun! Given that it was our first Hack Week, we were a little surprised at such promising presentations.
However, leading up to the week itself, we faced a difficult question…
How should we form teams?
We took inspiration from other Hack Weeks, and decided to have a pitch process for everyone participating to put forward their ideas. We decided that pitches would be lightly vetted before being opened up for project teams to form.
Even with a rough idea of the process, the devil was in the details, and we wanted to get this right.
The Pitch Process
We opened up a forum to gather ideas. Pitching an idea was as simple as filling out a short Google Form:
The spreadsheet of pitches was shared openly, so everyone could browse the list for inspiration before submitting their own idea. This also gave people time to consider which ideas they might want to work on.
A week before Hack Week, we closed the pitch form (after many Slack reminders) to allow time to review the ideas and form teams.
Reviewing Project Ideas
With 55 distinct pitches, we knew we couldn’t work on all of them, so we’d have to narrow it down. We wanted the process to feel democratic, while at the same time ensuring projects would be able to show off their innovation with a brief demo.
We wanted every participant to join a project they were enthused about, which, admittedly, we weren’t sure would be the outcome of our process.
“I Voted!”
After we closed our pitch form, we opened up a voting system for everyone to vote on the projects they wanted to work on.
While tedious, copying every project from Google Forms into a polling tool called Tricider was worth it, because it made it easy to see which projects had the most interest.
Going to Committee
From our list of 55 ideas, we cut our list in half by removing the ideas that didn’t have any votes. We then gathered a cross-functional group of engineers, designers, product managers, editors, and strategists to evaluate the rest. The group was made up of Hack Week participants, rather than all managers.
We asked questions like:
- Could this be demoed in a week?
- Does it offer new functionality to our users?
- Does it improve performance?
- What value does it provide internally?
- Could it be monetized?
By the end of this meeting, we had narrowed our list down to 15 projects that might be tackled during Hack Week.
Who goes where?
We had our project list, and we had volunteers who’d expressed interest in each one. Unfortunately, there was still the potential for chaos. How would teams actually form from here? Could we avoid assigning anyone at all?
As a first pass, we started by placing people on the teams they’d voted for, in a shared Google doc. We considered letting everyone choose from the 15 projects, but with limited time before Hack week, we decided to assign people to projects they had voted for.
Assigning people by votes accounted for two thirds of the team. For the rest, we created a shared Google doc of projects to join existing teams. We highlighted roles missing from each team—did they need an engineer, a designer, a product manager, an editor, or video manager?
Once we had this doc, we reached out to everyone who was unassigned, and gave the rundown of where people were needed, and how they could choose a project. At the last minute, we also revived one project that, apparently, had more interest than we’d previously gathered.
The Teams
Once it was clear which projects had engineers, it was easier for everyone else to join projects. Most of the teams had an even distribution of roles. A couple machine learning projects drew more engineers, and an experience-driven interactive article project pulled together a breadth of different roles.
For people who would be useful to many teams — like dev ops, who set up infrastructure to run the prototypes — we didn’t assign them to a specific team, but let them consult and hop in on projects as needed.
Some teams were lacking specific resources—a designer, for example. Here, we tried to assign specific “consultants” who would take time to answer questions and offer basic support, outside their main project.
In general, people were happy with their assigned teams. Relatively few people chose to switch, and from what we could see throughout the week, teams were enjoying the focused time.
Although we had a few hiccups going through this for the first time, the enthusiasm in everyone’s Friday presentations was tangible. We had thought there might be tension between having a good time and working on valuable ideas, but it turned out that wasn’t the case. Our teams enjoyed the week, met new people, and also demoed projects that we’re seriously considering developing in the future.
To summarize, our team-forming process:
- Open pitches, via Google Forms (3 weeks before Hack Week)
- Vote on ideas, with Tricider (1 week before)
- Review ideas with cross-functional group (3 days before)
- Sort people into teams, in a shared document (2 days before)
- Let people join or switch teams (2 days before, until Hack Week kickoff)
Closing Thoughts
After such a fun and productive Hack Week, we’ll do it again. We found that the process helped to yield strong ideas that our team was excited to work on. Next time, we’ll keep the basic structure, and add more offline activities, like in-person brainstorms and technology workshops, to help inspire project ideas and gather momentum.
Special thanks to Christine Moulton, Ivan Yang, and Erinn Danos, who helped immensely in defining this process.
If you’ve run a Hack Week, or are considering it, we’d love to see your comments on forming teams below.
