“How can we make this better?” That’s a question that can be heard every day…
How We Planned Our Hackathon
At Pingboard we do a hack day on the first Friday of every month. Today we teamed up with our design partner, Funsize, to work together on something special for our customers. More on what we built later… Today I wanted to share a bit about our process.
A hack day is a day where our team is free to work on projects that we would not ordinarily have the time to work on, relative to our other development priorities. Usually our folks each choose to work individually on a project that is of a particular interest to them… features they want to see in Pingboard, fixing bugs that have been annoying them, or building small features that our customers have asked for. The only requirement is that they must work on something that can be finished fully in one day, ideally getting it to a point where it can be released to customers that same day.
This time we took on something more ambitious and our entire team, including Funsize, worked on it together. Here is a general flow of how it went down…
A few weeks before
- picked a date
- started discussing a concept for what to build and looped in Funsize
- agreed on concept and date
The week before
- figure out who’s in from each team
- expanded the concept into a document of feature ideas, broken down by MVP (definitely want to get done on hack day), MVP+ (if there is time on hack day) and Future
- got input from entire team
- met with a couple customers to hear their ideas related to the concept
The day before
- confirmed who is in
- defined the backend development tasks that need to be built no matter what
- split up the development work between the team so that we could get it all done during the first half of the day, so that we could spend the second half of the day on front-end
- defined tasks related to how we would launch and split those tasks up between the non-development team
The night before
- team dinner to discuss the day
- final idea brain storm
- narrowed scope for a realistic MVP and MVP+
- agreed on a general schedule for the day
- decided who would buy the breakfast tacos, coffee, lunch and beer
The day
- 9:30: meet at Funsize office
- 9:35: confused, wondering where the breakfast tacos are
- 9:45: tacos, Houndstooth coffee delivered by Favor & kickoff
- 10:00: dev team starts coding backend; product & design team wireframes front-end
- 11:00: wireframes complete; updated dev team; broke up high priority design tasks & split up
- 1:00: reviewed high priority designs over lunch
- 1:30: final design revisions complete; defined secondary design priorities & split up
- 2:00: handed off design assets to dev; dev team switches to front-end coding
- 4:00: reviewed secondary priority designs
- 6:00 – demo
- 6:30 – happy hour
