Raising the bar with Hackathons!
It’s been a turbulent time in crypto recently, but throughout that time at Luno we’ve been working incredibly hard to raise the bar on what we give our customers, with big product features and enhancements; we’re here to change the world for the better and that takes commitment! The quality of ideas and execution is increasing every day and I’m excited about what we have launching in the next few months let alone the rest of 2023 and beyond.
We’ve had a mantra of “moving fast” throughout, not about people working harder or longer hours, but rather about hacking back unnecessary meetings, ensuring ownership and accountability is clear, making great decisions on the scope of what we build, and more.
Recently we took a day out of the day-to-day for our #MoveFastHack; a hackathon designed to encourage a pause to do exactly that - rethinking slow processes, breaking down barriers or assumptions, accelerating with technology and more. These kinds of initiatives are keeping us sharp and replenishing our energy!
Hacktastic
But this post isn’t about moving fast… it’s about Hackathons. So, what do I mean by Hackathon? It’s when groups of people take time out of their day job to focus on being creative and innovative, and to solve things for themselves or customers that really “move the needle”. Wikipedia has more here.
Our #MoveFastHack is just one of FOUR hacks we’re doing this year. We know that when there is a lot to get done, just getting your head down and burning out the team is the wrong thing to do - instead we must be really conscious of how we’re working, and we must take time to ensure our direction is sound, and experiment with potentially game changing ideas. Teamwork, honest opinions and open debate are foundations of our culture and Hackathons amplify these perfectly.
I am so proud of how the Luno team across the world came together and the incredible quality of the output we saw from just a single day event (and that makes me super excited about a 2+ day event we have planned later in the year!). We had no less than 25 teams and 100 people changing everything from automation for coin launches to better signposting for documentation - I loved it!
Successful Hackathons
We don’t have room for egos here, but I think it’s fair to say that we’ve become pretty good at this hackathon thing through the hard work of the Lunauts that have run the events. I thought it would be helpful to jot down what I think some of those “magic” ingredients are.
Plan and Prepare
First, allow plenty of time to plan. Form a small cross-disciplinary team, give them a small budget for prizes, define the judging criteria, give the hack a name and brand, give them your (senior) support, get buy-in from key people, select the judges, use internal channels to build anticipation, define how people form teams and enter, and more. Don’t underestimate the value of doing the practical basics to make it super-slick.
Give them a focus
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned over time is to give the hackathon a focus. This can be an outcome, an area of interest, or a set of known problems - but ultimately it creates a purpose and a focus for the hackathon.
The quality of output we’ve had using this model is far superior to anything that preceded it, but more importantly the output has also been actionable and useful. It is so easy for a hack to generate loads of great ideas, but none actually get picked up and used because they just don’t fit the needs of the business right now. There’s only one thing more demotivating than not doing any cool hackathons - and that’s doing one but not using anything the teams create when they’ve invested their souls in it!
We’ve got themes ranging from the broad “exploiting the power of crypto for our customers” and #MoveFastHack through to #TechDebtHack coming up next.
Timebox everything
Don’t let the hackathon take over everyone’s day job! In particular, give clear instructions about how long the hackathon lasts. We use two models;
Friday morning through to Monday evening, with the playback session on Tuesday morning. This is our biggest and obviously most expensive hack, allowing for optional weekend hacking (some teams love the weekend hacking, some really don’t want to - we leave it up to them).
Wednesday morning through to Wednesday evening, with the playback session on Thursday morning.
We’re also sensitive to the timezones people are in - which is why we allocate whole days for the hack, meaning our teams in Malaysia or Indonesia can get started when they start their day, not wait for some kind of kick off from those of us in the UK or South Africa.
This constrained time actually helps focus people I believe - it’s a classic entrepreneurship and agile technique, so fits very well.
Have a great play-back session
The excitement during our playback sessions is incredible. Teams are given very specific timing (depending on the number of teams that could be from 3 minutes to 10 minutes), and ideas or templates on how to present back.
For the longer hacks, we LOVE videos and the teams create mind blowing and often hilarious content! For the shorter ones when there is less time to polish, we tend to go with 3-4 slides, a live demo, or just a charismatic presenter (either human, or as we saw this time around, artificially intelligent).
Picking a great host for the event is key too; someone who can keep the mood high, the humour flowing, and the pace fast (and on time!), and even if you work remotely I recommend giving the option for “viewing parties” to form in each office where you can enjoy seeing the entries together.
Follow-through with ideas
Once the hackathon is done, your work is not finished. As I mentioned when discussing having a focus, it’s critical to get value from the hack beyond everyone having fun. This time around we have a page with all the teams on, and have chased up what they’re doing with their idea - that could be creating tickets for prioritisation consideration by Product, adopting a new way of working in their team, or simply storing the output because we learned from it. Making this happen and making it visible to the team are both really important.
Learn and iterate
After we’d run a few hacks, we started collecting all of the information we had about how to run a successful one on a Miro board, which was initially populated by running a retrospective on a previous hackathon. Then, we use those findings to guide running the next hack, and you guessed it - do a retrospective again and add to the board. Over time we’re getting more and more slick!
That’s it!
Well that’s it, short and simple. I love creating space for the teams to innovate, especially if we can use it to have a positive impact on customers, our community, or network; I encourage you to consider it too - the important thing is to get started and start learning… good luck!
