First Digital Hackathon
We can all get stuck in the day-to-day at times. A constant focus on our key metrics, fighting bureaucracy. Sometimes we need an opportunity to start on something new, something tantalising, something fresh. An opportunity to work with people we wouldn’t necessarily get chance to work with because they’re in other teams, other parts of the business or because they’re at a different level of seniority.
These are just some of the reasons we wanted to kick off our first Digital Hackathon.
So how did we do it, what were the stumbling blocks, how was it run and what did we produce?
Planning
Well, first off, we needed to recruit participants. We did this by sneakily adding “participate in the monthly hackathon” into the newly formed Graduation process. This bought us at least one person :) For the rest, we just fired out a message on Slack (which is how we do most of our communicating these days). Within an hour or two, we had about 15 people that seemed keen.
Next we wanted to get a date in the diary working on the theory that once we have a date, we’ll make it happen by that date. if we worry about all the other problems that needed to be solved first and then picked the date, it’d probably never happen. So we thorough up some options on Doodle and after a few iterations we had a date. Woo hoo!!
Next, we had to sell the idea into the business. We knew what some of their reservations might’ve been so here’s how we addressed them:
Will people not see it as an opportunity to just doss about?
- We originally planned to dedicate 1 day or work time plus a day of personal time to the hackathon. This ensured those that signed up were at least committed enough to give up their own personal time. We then went back to the business once we had a list of those committed to to the idea and tried to figure out a way of running both days in work time.
Teams are focused on outcomes, is it wise to take “time off” for activities that won’t impact these outcomes?
- We all have 20% of our work week dedicated to non outcome related work (stuff like training, 1to1s, functional meetings etc). We asked everyone that wanted to be part of the hackathon to both forsake their usual 20% time activities for 2 weeks giving us all 2 straight days to dedicate to the hackathon. This also solved our previous issue of people wanting to move the hackathon to be solely in work time.
Will you produce anything of value?
- That’s not the point. We found that as soon as some people in the business heard we were working on a hackathon they wanted to fill the 2 days with normal backlog stuff. We wanted to make it clear the purpose of the first (and possible 2nd and 3rd hackathons) was to concentrate on establishing and strengthening relationships with like mind digital people.
Next, we had to get a venue. As it had to be self-funded we wanted to ensure we hit the following things:
- Out of the office (I know how a change of scenery can help people think differently)
- Not corporate (we want somewhere fun)
- Close to our office in Maidenhead
- Available for 48 hours(ish) solid as we want the flexibility to work through the night
I originally booked somewhere on Airbnb but sadly got let down at the 11th hour so just ended up running at my house which seemed to tick all the above.
Running
We all turned up (well… I was already there) at my place at 09:30 on Thursday 3rd September. We had a great mixture of:
- 3.5 UXers
- 2 Designers
- 1 Developer
We first decided on the following 2 rules:
- Whatever we do, we must ship. We can’t leave with something unfinished.
- People ca work on whatever they like with whoever they like.
Ideally we’d have a bunch more developers but luckily most of us were pretty T-Shaped so we were able to most of the development ourselves and just leave the heavy lifting to the Developer.
After about 30 mins of chit0chat and prevarication we started to develop a list of all the ideas we had for the next 48 hours. Once we had this list we then ranked them (Small, Medium and Large) on Business Benefit, Customer Benefit, Fun Factor and Likelihood of Achieving. This then gave us a bit of context before we all then voted on which projects we’d most like to work on. We ended up deciding on the following 3 things:
KPI Dashboard — something visually pleasing that can show us all where we are as a department and also on a team by team basis against our yearly KPIs
Size Matters — a phone size comparator
Digitising the Amys — the are our new self-managed cultural recognition scheme
We then organised ourselves into teams and got cracking. We spent about the first few hours each doing research, storyboarding and then by lunchtime presented back to each other team where we were and what what our plans were. Some of us realised we needed people back at the office so we quickly spotted back for an hour to do some digging and then headed back to crack on.
By the end of day one we’d
- Built a 3 MVPs
- Had a bunch of fun
- Drank 11 bottles of desperado
- Eaten lots of crisps and cake
Day 2kicked off with a slightly smaller but just as enthused team who carried on with work and by 6pm on Friday 4th we released the 3 things we set out to. Here’s a few screenshots and a few photos (sadly as some of the data is sensitive we’ve had to remove links and blur numbers).
In terms of our objective “establishing and strengthening relationships with like mind digital people” I’d say it was a resounding success and I’m super excited about organising the next one. Here’s what everyone else said:
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