upday Hack-Week

After two smaller hackathons - one for Android developers, dedicated to testing and another for the entire engineering team, targeting general improvements in automation and productivity - we decided that it was time to go to the next level and expand the innovation opportunity beyond the engineering teams. So we created the first upday-“Hack-Week”.

This is an account of who participated, how we pitched the ideas, who worked on implementing them and most of all what we learned from the Hack-Week.

Who

Developers, product owners, editors, finance, business intelligence or marketing colleagues, all have one thing in common - everyone has lots of ideas! We wanted to give every person a chance to see their ideas come to life. We know that there’s always space for improvement on all levels, so we opened the Hack-Week to everyone in the company. The Hack-Week gave the opportunity for close collaboration between people who usually have a more distant working relationship. The closeness afforded by the Hack-Week meant that we didn’t have those same boundaries.

When

Our Hack-Week was actually a three-day event, finishing on the day of upday’s first anniversary! In the week before the Hack-Week, we opened the ideas submission. We ended up with more than thirty; ranging from very technical ones to improvements on the development process or new features. On the first day, everyone had two minutes to pitch their ideas and afterwards, everyone chose what they wanted to work on. In total, thirteen teams were created, varying in size from one to up to seven people.

Results

We had prototypes for different upday related apps, close to production-ready features and even a tool to give some more insights into our productivity. We got the chance to see our ideas come true, try different APIs or technologies and discover just how many things we can actually do when we have a bit of friendly competition. We discovered that the upday family possesses a wide range of diverse talents and that, most of all, when working together we can make everything happen!

Special thanks go to Anca Todirica for the photos!