Our Halloween Hackathon
Our hackathons started as a way to get something done quickly on the Niche Engineering team. It grew into a way to support an innovation culture and foster a collaborative, fun, and inventive environment across our entire product development organization. We’ve tried running our hackathons a few different ways, most with mixed success. These are four takeaways from a year of conducting these events and what we’ve learned.
We chose a two day event, scheduled over October 30th and 31st, to incorporate the Halloween festivities into the mix. This definitely brightened our day and made the final event, Demo Day, a real treat…
Takeaway 1: Communicate. And then communicate again.
There are three events that make our hackathons work: Pitch Day, the Hackathon, and Demo Day. We collaboratively pick dates that work across the product development organization so we end up with quarterly hackathons. We’ve found that this is the right amount of time so we’re not constantly hacking, but not forgetting they exist either.
Leading up to all three events are announcements, both in person at company standups and via Slack, so we can build anticipation and participation. In previous hackathons, if we didn’t communicate weekly, people didn’t feel as enticed to join or didn’t think it was meant for them. This wasn’t the culture we wanted to promote, so we needed to talk about it routinely leading up to Pitch Day.
Takeaway 2: Invite everyone.
Pitch Day is where everyone comes together for a couple hours to pitch their ideas for a hackathon team to form around. Everyone’s invited to Pitch Day.
We’ve found it’s best to be open to all ideas including new features, full product revamps, process automation, integrations, or just a problem someone might need help solving. Our Data team manager pitched an idea for our rankings process to be more dynamic. Our Partnerships team pitched a few ideas that would increase traffic and optimize our product for better partner deals. Internal tools are also a favorite idea to pitch.
When everyone is invited, and there are few restrictions on projects, the ideas will reach far and wide to create an inclusive and innovative event.
Takeaway 3: Make it fun.
The day of the hackathon is go-time. Groups can take over booths, conference rooms, or tables, hacking away at their favored project. The regular Slack channels tend to quiet down on these days. We’ve found that giving staff plenty of time, space and food makes for a good event. Choosing to incorporate Halloween was a big hit and practically guaranteed the second day was entertaining and memorable.
Takeaway 4: Follow up
Demo Day, the final event, is a 1–2 hour meeting that takes place after the hackathon so teams can demo their work. This time around, we decided to conduct this meeting at the end of the second hackathon day rather than giving teams a day or two in between to make their presentations. If we hold Demo Day right away, it’s a more concrete challenge to get things done during the Hackathon. Teams present their progress and generally have a walk through of their final results. This is when people can showcase their creativity and share their hard work.
