Hosting a Hack Day

Last week, Which?’s Product & Technology team hosted its first Hack Day in a very long time. Spread across two days, the team came together to wow a panel of judges with a wide variety of new ideas, all in pursuit of the Hack theme “Reaching new audiences”.

What is a Hack Day?
In case you’re not familiar, in this context “hack” doesn’t mean trying to break into a system. Rather, it’s when a group of people come together to rapidly build a working prototype of an idea. It is all about breaking out from the day-to-day to allow for a little creative freedom, to work with people you wouldn’t typically work with and to scratch that itch of an idea you’ve wanted to see gain some traction.

Why host a Hack Day?
First and foremost, Hack Days are about having fun and bringing a team together. It’s an opportunity to spread out and break down some barriers by working with people you might not do so on a usual day-to-day basis. It’s also an opportunity to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily get to, which might mean experimenting with a new technology, or branching out into a new functional space.

What I really love about Hack Days, though, is how they can show a team just how much can really be achieved in a short period of time when they break out of the perceived constraints of the day-to-day work culture.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between throwing together a quick working prototype and the robust, secure and scalable production quality code that supports a releasable experience. It’s worth noting that this point can be hard to explain to stakeholders; it’s important to spend a little time helping the wider organisation understand the difference to avoid missetting expectations about what’s possible or unintentionally creating any sense that the teams are slow and lazy whenever they’re not in Hack Day mode.

So, why host a Hack Day? To help build and retain a high-performing team!

What about the naysayers?
‘Isn’t it too expensive to take the whole team out of action for two days?’ ~ ‘Is it really a good use of time when we have so many important initiatives to work through?’ ~ ‘We’re already finding prioritisation difficult because we don’t have enough time to build the things we want, do we really need more ideas?’

You may find you have to do a little convincing to get your Hack Day off the ground. This isn’t unusual, particularly in smaller organisations. If you need to convince Finance or your CEO, I find it best to talk in terms of employee retention and attraction. There’s a real monetary value that can be attributed to keeping good staff for longer, and attracting new ones.

Tips for hosting:

1. Publish the theme or goal for the Hack nice and early so that people can think it over in advance
2. Create a collaboration board for people to brainstorm and share ideas on — tools like Miro or JamBoard are great for this
3. Limit team sizes — we chose a maximum of 5
4. Ensure engineers are evenly distributed across teams — you can do this on your sign-up sheet by having slots for each key discipline
5. Allow for an appropriate opt-out; seek total attendance but acknowledge that some people might be working on high-priority time-critical work (it’s great if these people can still make it along for the hour or so of demos and prizing giving though, so make sure you still invite them along)
6. Don’t limit it to just Product & Technology folk, include a small number of other disciplines from across the organisation to provide a breadth of inputs
7. Publish an agenda and include an end of day 1 wrap-up — the structure will be light touch but is critical to the smooth running of the event (see our simple template below)
8. Bring in external judges to up the stakes and provide fresh perspectives
9. Ask a few Engineering Leaders to act as floor walkers to offer support and advice to teams
10. Share links and documentation on internal systems and APIs in advance
11. Publish an FAQ and cover the basics: where, what time, can people expense travel etc
12. Keep the final presentations short and fast flowing — we allowed 10 minutes per team including time for questions and a little break at the midway point
13. Have a simple scorecard (see our template below)
14. Have prizes — we had small monetary prizes that the teams could use together for a social event but having something physical to hand out could be even better
15. Fuel the engines — we had more than enough pizza for lunch on both days and plenty of snacks

Our judges (left to right): Shelley Mannion — CPO at Verisart, (with me, Rico Surridge), Anabel Hoult — CEO at Which?, and Abisola Fatokun — CPTO at Government Digital Service

Our winners
Our judges were impressed by the breadth of ideas and implementations that were presented as well as the thoughtful consideration of the end users. In the end, three teams and their ideas came out ahead:

1. Uno Reverse — A chrome browser extension that scraped the pages you visit to see if Which? has any product or service review details while you browse in context, saving you having to open a new tab to our website to check for yourself.
2. The Deal Breakers — A feature extension on our product/service affiliate retail links that added a badge and some details when a particularly good deal was to be had (i.e. a retailer offering 30% off).
3. Everyday Essential Champions — A dynamic tool that on answering a few short questions, used pricing information feeds, to present the most cost-effective local supermarket to purchase your everyday essentials from.

Our winning team (left to right): Scott Gurney, Marcus Tucker, (with me, Rico Surridge), Ben Lynch, Peter Cole, and Akli Aissat

A few snaps from our day:

Template judges score card and event agenda:

Thanks go to all the individuals/teams that participated, the Engineering Leaders that walked the floor and supported us throughout, our Judges and our event organisers without whom none of this would have come together.

All thoughts are my own.