Hacking Your Way To Product Excellence

Can engaging in hackathons help drive your product forward? Do internal hackathons actually help solve problems and generate new ideas? Find out which aspects of the hackathon world can be useful to you and your team, no matter what size, when building towards product excellence.

Transcript

1. Hacking Your Way to Product Excellence Martyn Davies (@martynd) SendGrid EMEA How To Web 2014
2. Who am I? • SendGrid EMEA Team Lead • Developer • Serial hackathon organiser • Accelerator mentor • Startup advisor • Reformed Product Manager & CSM @martynd // github.com/martyndavies // linkedin.com/martynrdavies
3. …and what is this? How can engaging your team and your company in ‘hacking’ events help drive your product forward?
4. ‘Hackathon’ (noun) 24 hours to create something from nothing Photos from Music Hack Day Barcelona & London by Thomas Bonte
5. What are hackathons good for? • Creativity • Motivation • Experimentation • Product feedback and testing • Working with likeminded people • Tapping the ‘collective’ knowledge Hackathons are great places to learn Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2014 by Thomas Bonte
6. What do I know about it? • Organised 15 hackthons • From 15-250 people • ~380 hours of hacking time • Over 1000 ‘hackers’ • Over 750 projects • Advise 10 more events each year • Attended over 100+ since 2007 Photo from Music Hack Day London 2013 by Thomas Bonte
7. How can hackathons benefit your small product team? Photo of Wikimedia Hackagthon 2013 by Sebastiaan ter Burg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/8812567121)
8. Small Product Team • Often borne out of hacking an idea • Scrappy, react quickly, build and ship • Feedback makes it to production quickly • Short ‘sprints’, active, changing stories • Everyone contributes to product vision • In control of their output Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2014 by Thomas Bonte
9. What they get out of it • Restriction free time to work on ideas • Introductions to new technologies • Peer knowledge and support • Chance to move fast and break things • Direct product feedback loop • Input from third party developers Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2014 by Thomas Bonte
10. How it helps their product • Supports a build & test mentality • A problem shared is a problem halved • Environment is similar to their office • See real people use the product • See other developers build on the API • Bug fix in ‘real time’ Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2014 by Thomas Bonte
11. Who are these people!? Makeshift • Attending.io • Hire My Friend We Make Awesome Sh • SnowBuddy • AwesomeWall • Their entire company SendGrid DS • Loader.io • Reflector.io • CleverDB
12. How can hackathons benefit your large product team? Photo of Wikimedia Hackagthon 2013 by Sebastiaan ter Burg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/8812567121)
13. Large Product Team • Usually groups of smaller teams • Work on cores of the main product • Longer sprints, longer backlog • Can’t be as scrappy as smaller teams • Everyone contributes to product vision • Focus on output is key Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2013 by Thomas Bonte
14. How it helps them… • Great for product feedback • Great for developer happiness • Great for learning about new tech • Great for collaboration with co- workers on non work projects • Test some things in the wild …but not necessarily the product Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2013 by Thomas Bonte
15. Why it might not help the product • Hard to filter and prioritise feedback • Managers think time away from product dev is bad • People often go to hackathons to get away from their day job for a bit • Test some things in the wild but that fix isn’t making it production any time soon Photo from Music Hack Day Barcelona 2013 by Thomas Bonte
16. What can you do to fix this? Photo of Wikimedia Hackagthon 2013 by Sebastiaan ter Burg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/8812567121)
17. Let’s agree that this is good, okay? • Restriction free time to work on ideas • Introductions to new technologies • Peer knowledge and support • Chance to move fast and break things • Direct product feedback loop • Input from other developers Photo from Music Hack Day London 2013 by Thomas Bonte
18. The Magical World of Internal Hackathons Photo of Wikimedia Hackagthon 2013 by Sebastiaan ter Burg (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/8812567121)
19. ‘Internal Hackathon’ (noun) 24 hours to create something that might be related to pushing your core product forward Photos from Music Hack Day Barcelona & London by Thomas Bonte
20. Case Study: SendGrid • First internal hackathon, May 2014 • Over 65 participants from 4 locations • Engineering, Ops, Product, HR, TAMs • 20 finished projects in 24 hours • 6 projects moved to backlog/integrated • Guests from Twilio & Digital Ocean https://sendgrid.com/blog/sendgrid-internal-hackathon/
21. Case Study: SendGrid “To be completely honest, I was a bit skeptical of the value of the internal hackathon but walked away completely impressed.”
22. Case Study: SendGrid The best part of the event was, “drastic amount of learning in a short amount of time.”, “the learning and interaction.”
23. Case Study: SendGrid “ Seeing the different hacks, I was so proud to be working with these smart, invested, and creative people.”
24. Case Study: SendGrid • Identify potential customers • Monitor the amount of office beer • New SDKs for SendGrid • New SendGrid website features • Making meetings better • Is the dishwasher on? • Games • Learning colleagues names • Tools for our customers • New API features Full list of projects: http://www.hackerleague.com/hackathons/sendgrid-internal-hackathon/hacks
25. Case Study: SendGrid
26. Case Study: SendGrid Should we do this again? Full list of projects: http://www.hackerleague.com/hackathons/sendgrid-internal-hackathon/hacks 100% said ‘yes’
27. Case Study: Caplin Systems • 5 internal hackathons since 2010 • Thematic (HTML, Flying Cars etc) • Engineering, Ops, Product, HR, Sales • 19 projects from October 2014 • 4 projects moved to backlog/integrated • Plenty of bizarre/fun ideas too
28. Case Study: Caplin Systems • 2010: HTML5 • 2011: Mobile • 2012: Developer Productivity • 2013: Workflows & Data • 2014: Hoverboards & Flying Cars • 2014: Level Up The Company (Product to Culture)
29. Case Study: Caplin Systems “Caplin have lots of software components in their locker. Hackathons result in surprising combinations of those components that deliver real innovation and demonstrate the power of the tools the company has. The latter has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire company by exposing tools and use cases.” Phil Leggetter, Caplin Systems
30. Case Study: Caplin Systems “The biggest benefit, in my opinion, for Caplin is that it helps everybody realise just how powerful the software really is which can be a real boost to moral.” Phil Leggetter, Caplin Systems
31. Do it, but remember this: • Highlight common paint points • Note and highlight complementary tech • Demo previously discarded ideas • Encourage use of competitors • Scratch your own itch • Commit to rolling good ideas into the roadmap, make someone responsible Photo from Music Hack Day London 2011 by Thomas Bonte
32. …and this: www.hackerpledge.org https://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/9312170928
33. …and this: There should ALWAYS be Lego. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/9312170928
34. Mulţumesc mult. martyn@sendgrid.com @martynd