How Engineering Managers can benefit from Hackathons
During Summer 2022, I introduced a tradition to my team to bring our creativity and engineering mindset one step further and to work together to find creative solutions for real-world scenarios and problems that our customers (or ourselves) face.
These monthly hackathons have been one of the most successful add-ons to our team ceremonies. The monthly time-boxed sessions have led to some cool ideas!
Motivation
Activities such as global projects, developing product features, focusing on automating manual operations, or applying predefined security requirements are good examples of learning opportunities for a team. Such activities are vital but can easily take us into execution-only mode. We must also make time to be innovative.
We all have felt sometimes we were not “innovating” much as we like. It is essential to keep the team motivated and bring a change to the team, to get more out of engineering minds, and showcase some ideas to the product.
Structure
Hackathon is a programming event that lasts from 24 hours to one week. The objective of a hackathon is for a group of engineers to work together on a collaborative project. The beauty of such events is that there is no restriction on the type of software being created or the new system’s design and programming language being used.
Hackathons typically start with communication via a hosting organization presentation that mentions the hackathon’s objectives, terms, and details.
Afterward, the participating individuals or teams start their programming work. The administrator of the hackathon is typically able to answer questions and offer help when issues arise in the event. In the end, teams present their solution designs and piece of work they have hacked together in the event.
We organized the hackathons in our team:
We allocated a half-day event in which we briefed the team on the “problem definition”.
We have added two team members, Alice & Bob, who demonstrate the “customer” problems to the team!
Alice is a solopreneur. She is a fashion designer and has her line of clothing called Alice & Co. She recently went live on e-commerce market place. She has to provide the customers with a hard copy of the invoices for the items she sold on the e-shop.
She lacks technical knowledge and cannot afford to hire a freelancer how can we help her to continue her business online🥲
We give the team a recommended timeline to structure their work.
- Participants: Engineering Lead and Product Manager, Engineers
- Time Table:
At the end of hackathon day, the team had to present their work and get our feedback! Here you can invite your principal engineers or even the stakeholders who may be interested.
Tip
Leave the room/call after you have onboarded the team to allow them time to brainstorm with fewer authorities in the room! We noticed that our team got less “shy” when the Engineering Lead and Product Manager left the room and became more active in the discussions. This effect is often referred to as a cognitive bias.
Of course, drop into the sessions from time to time in the meeting rooms (onsite) or breakout rooms (remote) to answer engineers’ questions and unblock them. Here we must be careful to clarify the problem statement only and not bias or give tips on solution space.
What’s Next After the Hack Days?
In the sessions already, EL and PMs can assess the feasibility of the tasks and plan for them.
Since we pick “real-world scenarios”, we turn them into user stories to tackle them in our team processes as part of our upcoming Sprints.
This ensures that we bring those solutions to a more structured design and future-proof implementation.
You should strive to minimize the gap between the Sprints and Hackathons, which keeps the topic fresh and reduces the onboarding time of the work items.
What do Hackathons Teach You as a Leader?
- If your team is looking for motivation to come to the office, the key is in your hand! Hacking onsite is way more fun and a good starting point to practice the 60/40 working model.
- You can strengthen your team dynamics by running such an event.
- We were able to share real-world scenarios and highlight the business impact to let the team practice their “business acumen” skills.
- Frontend Engineers learned a lot from backend services, and much knowledge sharing happened.
- Discovered some superpowers and new skill sets from the engineers in the team, such as presentation and project management skills which may be identified late in the “daily” work.
- Engineers were able to have their customer-focus hat on. They were thinking more about the Partner (customer) and trying to improve the experience. At the end of the session, they received even more visibility of the customer experience.
Key Takeaways from Hackathons
Hackathons are potent tools and an excellent opportunity for companies to engage in learning. The benefits of hosting an event centered around technology teams are:
- Unite the team around a common goal
- Boost team culture
- Strengthen the relationship between engineering and product
- Move away from pure execution and get fresh and new ideas.
- Get a better understanding of ways of working in the team.
- Challenge your software engineers to sharpen their time management
- Exercise prioritization with the team
- Practice making trade-offs
- Let yourself and the engineers in the team identify where they can improve their skills.
- Enable engineers to be closer to business
- Increase engineer’s confidence in problem-solving skills
Summary
Internal hackathons have yielded some notable features that we use daily. The Like button on Facebook is one of those examples. Use this tool and event for team bonding and shaping new product opportunities!
So..when will your first hackathon be?
