Why did we care?
After two years of firing on all cylinders, I could sense our team morale was beginning to slump. We were still delivering stunning experiments at a high velocity, and were consistently praised for our work. In the quiet moments, though, it was clear that our small team needed a better way to handle the huge influx of requests and begin to assert agency over our work. I decided to lead a week-long hackathon during which we celebrated how far we'd come, discussed our frustrations, and made practical steps toward implement solutions.
Why a hackathon?
We dedicated one week to critically examine what was not working, and then designing solutions to address these areas. A hackathon is intentionally scrappy, and the primary goal is to have built something real by the last day.
What was our process?
One part of our process was to not announce the plans to do a hackathon. This was very counterintuitive to how we were accustomed to working, since we usually bring stakeholders in at all phases of our work. We also recognized the urgency of taking time as a team to innovate, and I feared that announcing it would end up putting it off to 'a time when it's not so busy' (which never comes). In order to still meet our deadlines, we scheduled the hackathon sessions for about three hours each day in the mornings. This left the afternoons free for meetings and getting stuff done, while dedicating our best hours to innovation.
Other than that, the process was fairly straightforward:
- Open a Miro board, and begin brainstorming wins, challenges, and possible fixes
- Bucket the ideas into themes.
- Determine the scope and final deliverable(s) for each theme.
2021 Growth Hackathon, Fixing a lot of %!$# — three hours a day for a week.
Three themes emerged
- Improving operations
- Improving an internal framework that we used to create tests
- Improving the visibility of our experiments
Then, we started building
The first year of the hackathon yielded a new product, and subsequent years have led to new ways of working, creative ways to keep our skills sharp, and other teams adopting a similar framework. In addition to getting to team bonding, this week crucially empowers us to come to larger offsites with more more agency over our day-to-day work.
And the tl;dr
We've made incredible strides in our team's perception and impact over the last three years.
Here are a few highlights for each year.
2021
+ We got clear about out process by identifying ways to estimate deadlines and questions to ask before every project.
+ We identified a need for a central repository for growth experiments and their results.
+ We began learning After Effects as a team so that we could easily create scalable, stunning animations (including Lottie files).
2022
+ We successfully got executive sponsorship to build Greenhouse, the growth respository.
+ We identified a need to consolidate how we were tracking projects, and began using Jira.
+ We added new folks to the team and navigated a major reorg successfully.
2023 & 2024
+ We transitioned from Adobe Xd to Figma, and built our first comprehensive Vision Deck focused on growth design as a discipline.
+ We kicked off monthly brown bags. Each member of the team presented on a topic that was important for them and interesting for others. Topics included parametric design (led by yours truly), giving powerful feedback, learnings from a workshop on complex projects, and more.
+ Our small team covered 10 areas of work – and lived to tell the tale.
+ We navigated two additional reorgs, hired new team members, and began to work on a new area of the business.
