Innovation at WeightWatchers!

At WW, we are purpose-built on science, coaching and community. We aim to provide a strong omni-channel experience that delivers weight loss in a healthy and sustainable manner. Our engineers, product managers and product designers bring creative innovation to all they do each and every day, following industry standard approaches such as design thinking, agile, etc. to bring that experience to life digitally. And WW Tech truly believes in pushing creative innovation to meet our members where they are and beyond, which is why we empower our team to further our innovation and better our experience.

While we foster innovation in our work everyday, we have a few extra fun ways we like to innovate as well. We created a slack channel called #WW-Hacks, where our engineers post ideas they are interested in hacking together and then work with management to give them the space to execute on those ideas — year round. Another is our annual Hackathon, which gives our teams the opportunity to think outside of the box and showcase their ideas. #WW-Hacks and our Hackathon have been so successful this year that we are already in the process of pushing some of the ideas to our members. In this post we are giving a sneak peek of how the Hackathon came to life and showcasing the amazing work from the participating teams.

We became a remote-first company in 2021 with a “work from wherever” philosophy, which meant our Hackathon needed to be reformatted to a virtual-friendly setting to ensure the entire company could attend. Some teams met in the office while others joined on Zoom.

Teams presented their projects before a panel of judges such as WeightWatchers’ CEO, Chief Technology Officer, and Head of Product to name a few, along with WeightWatchers employees across the company to experience creativity brought to life. The teams worked cross functionally and flipped their usual day-to-day roles which added a twist and an exciting challenge. It was a huge success, check out some of what they did….

• An exercise app that uses computer vision to analyze the effectiveness of your workouts.

• Suggesting personalized food pairings based on your food tracking history
• Personalizing the food search and recipe browsing experiences to meet members’ dietary preferences
• Building a new feature to enable members to share WW milestones to Instagram and other social networks.

Hack 22’ was a huge success and our members can expect to see some of the amazing work coming to life from each team live in our app soon!

At WeightWatchers we always enjoy taking the time to come together and maintain the strong foundation we are rooted in; a supportive community. To have fun, be creative and cheer one another on as we seek to provide the best digital experience possible for our members.

Betsey Corey - Director, Strategic Talent Programs & Partnerships

Interested in joining the WW team? Check out the careers page to view technology job listings as well as open positions on other teams.