How smart businesses are using hackathons to grow
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A presentation from Simply Business on how the hackathon format is producing great results.
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How smart businesses are using hackathons to grow
- 1. Hackathons
- 2. Agenda 1. How we do hackathons at Simply Business 2. What has Simply Business achieved with hackathons 3. How you can start doing hackathons
- 3. About Simply Business • UK’s largest business insurance broker • A tech company in the insurance business • Tech team of 30 • Offices in London and Northampton
- 4. Hackathons at Simply Business Two formats of hackathon: • All company • Continuous Why have two formats?
- 6. All Company Hackathon Goals: • Bring people together • Try lots of ideas • Work on whatever you like • Engage people • Have some fun
- 7. All Company Hackathon Format: • Announce one week prior • Pitch meeting one day prior • Two days of hacking • Demo meeting • Winner by vote gets prize
- 9. Continuous Hackathon Goals: • Quickly try out radical ideas • Work on a passion project • Give otherwise quiet people opportunities to shine
- 10. Continuous Hackathon Format: • Pitches heard fortnightly at the all hands meeting • Vote for pitch • Lasts for two weeks • Option to re-pitch
- 11. What Have We Achieved?
- 15. How Can You Hackathon?
- 16. All Company Hackathon • Budget for pizza, beer, kit, prizes • Involve everyone • Pause day to day work • Choose what you work on • Working alone is okay • Anyone can pitch anything
- 17. Continuous Hackathon • Provide support for writing pitches • Company votes on pitch after Q & A • Bring in the right people • Two weeks with no distractions, holidays • Hacked code goes live (but don’t break anything!)
- 18. Hackathon: Word to the Wise Apps: • Will be unfinished • No direct application to your business Post hackathon: • Have a plan Hackathon is not backdoor prioritisation!
- 19. Q & A Who has tried hackathons? What would prevent you from trying a hackathon?
- 20. Resources Hackathon tips Constructive criticism of hackathons Simply Business guide to hackathons Lessons learned from our initial hackathon Simply Business continuous hackathon Video from our 2014 hackathon Video from our 2012 hackathon Careers in tech at Simply Business Recent hackathon about clustering Leaderboard hackathon
Editor's Notes
- Along the way will be giving examples of projects we’ve worked on in our hackathons
- We’ve adopted agile throughout our organization Contact centre in Northampton Development in London Some collaboration between offices, but we need more
- All company: The whole company goes on hackathon for 2 days, all other work pauses Continuous: 1-2 people go on hackathon for 2 weeks, they leave their current team/project for the duration Why? Each format has a different goal One brings the whole company together One allows people to try out radical ideas more often Image: EgilsBot – A remote controlled robot built using an Arduino with webcam. Controlled via web interface. Designed to allow one of our remote workers to ‘walk’ around the office.
- The whole company pauses what they are working on for two days to work on the hack of their choosing Image: Most hackathons are fuelled by pizza, ours are no exception
- Work with people you don’t normally get to interact with You select what project you work on – It should be fun/interesting to you Can provide a nice break after meeting a tough deadline The goal is not necessarily to produce an output with direct value to the business Have realistic expectations – you won’t get anything near a production ready output Image: Gesture controlled quadcopter. Used game sensor Kinect? to track gestures – quadcopter moves up/down/left/right based on the gesture of the pilot
- Announcing ahead of time gives people time to come up with ideas and prepare pitches Anyone with an idea can pitch – We’ve had some dumb ideas, e.g. hat mounted webcam for remote workers Give everyone 5 minutes to pitch their idea at the pitch meeting: What’s the idea, what do you hope to achieve in 2 days, why should you care? Allow additional time for Q&A Once the pitches are heard, let everyone join the pitch they like the most One-person teams are okay Start hacking the next day – make sure the teams are sat together. All other work pauses After hackathon completes, at the demo meeting, give each team 5-10 minutes to show off what they’ve accomplished Let everyone vote for the best hack (people’s choice, management’s choice) – winner gets a prize Image: The little printer: A tiny web-controlled printer. We connected the printer up to our social media feeds and printed feedback we received from our customers.
- 1-2 people going away to hack for two weeks on an idea
- It’s a nice break from the day to day grind Smaller impact on day to day business than the all company hackathon Tend to get more immediate business value Image: Building our own video conferencing app with WebRTC and Websockets
- Pitch can be informal or formal, i.e. with slides, a hypotheses Give time for Q & A Vote for: 1. Do the hack 2. Don’t do the hack Leave your team for 2 weeks whilst hacking – no interruptions To re-pitch means you’d like more time to work on your hack. You’d need to provide justification for why you’d like the extra time. Again, company would vote on if your hack should continue Image: Applying machine learning on our claims data to determine how we might predict future claims
- Some business benefit (mostly from continuous hackathon) A better culture – bottom up vs top down Better collaboration/relationships between our offices A recruitment tool Contribution to the tech community – We blog about our hacks Learning: New tools and technologies, learned more about our business
- Learned about what motivates telesales people (competition) Learned about structure of contact centre Learned new technology: Websockets Improved relationship between London and Northampton offices Used by: Consultants Team managers Management Because we have a custom back office system, we’ve built these tools ourselves. If you are using Salesforce, you could modify your configuration to get this functionality.
- Team was in a bad position – Losing sales at the weekend when there were unexpected outages Learned what measures drive the business Brought together tech and business for common goal Usage is expanding – What other systems can we monitor and alert on? Because we have a custom back office system, we’ve built these tools ourselves. If you are using Salesforce, you could modify your configuration to get this functionality.
- API is something we’d talked about doing for a while, but hackathon presented opportunity to try it Allows us to integrate with third parties to simplify quoting and provide cross-selling opportunities Again brought together tech and business for common goal Won this year’s hackathon
- Teach everyone about hackathons and why you want to try them Get buy-in from all areas of the business
- Feed everyone lunch on both days, have beers in the afternoon Kit like RaspberryPi, Arduino, quadcopters, etc. It is a fun competition, take the winning team out to dinner Everyone, from reception up to CEO By letting people choose what they work on, the bad pitches won’t get worked on Critical people will need to stay in their roles, e.g. inbound consultants – but you could alternate people in critical roles for subsequent hackathons
- There is a bit of sales required to giving a good pitch – some people might not have the skills required, so give them some support If it is a bad idea, everyone will be able to have their say by voting it down Most hackathons consist of two people If someone is sick or gets pulled into something urgent, let them extend the hackathon Accept some level of risk in order to get hack tested in front of customers – AB testing frameworks can help by isolating traffic
- Remember, it is a hackathon, not a productionathon Production apps can take months to polish Whilst they might not have direct application to your business, the side benefits can make up for this: learning, teamwork, recruitment You might have an app or idea that shows promise – don’t let this die. Have a plan to let work continue on the project Delete any unsuccessful hacks from your codebase A project that needs to be completed anyways is not a hackathon, don’t try to make it one just to get someone working on it (that would be a top-down hack)
- What was your hackathon experience like?