Hacking Together in a Remote World
By: Lindsey Breen
Tags: Company Culture, Streaming, Hackathons, Technology, Disney Plus

Like everyone else, Disney Streaming has had to quickly adjust to this new mostly-remote world. In fact we launched Disney+ in Europe within a couple of weeks of our teams going into lockdown. Since then, we’ve added more European countries, launched in Latin America, added some new exciting and in some cases groundbreaking features (such as GroupWatch), listened and improved our experience, and even innovated on how we monitor the platform remotely. So we thought it was about time our teams got to do something different and fun…. our first company-wide hackathon!

At the core, hackathons are exercises in ideation, innovation, and creative problem solving, but for Disney Streaming, it was also an opportunity to host a remote-friendly company-wide event that wasn’t just another game of Code Names or Quiplash, amirite? We loved that we could have teams across our geographically distributed organization work together, with colleagues they might not normally get to work with, and stimulate their creative energy!

And in addition to all that, our hackathon came with all the usual benefits:

It was a fun way to focus our teams’ collective creativity towards innovation, focused around real business goals and priorities

It helped drive a culture of innovation by encouraging teams to think outside of the box or creatively solve problems — resulting in various ideas and enhancements which we’re now evaluating how to “productionize” in many cases!

It was a great chance for our employees to meet new colleagues and incorporate diversity of opinion and experience into ideas that might not otherwise be discovered

It provided space and time for our teams to tackle opportunities they are interested in and learn something new

The Hackathon was centered around a common theme, with several tracks to inspire our teams. As we’re all big fans of the Mandalorian — and The Child in particular — we decided to go with This is the way.

The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and the Child in THE MANDALORIAN, season two, exclusively on Disney+

Like the Mandalorian people, we are bound together through our organizational values and ideals. Empowered by a relentless focus on solving complex challenges, we’ve accomplished the unimaginable together and must continue to collaborate, unite, and celebrate our differences. We are stronger together. This is the way.

The hackathon was broken into three tracks that tie back to our values and what makes us successful:

Delight Subscribers: We have a long standard of innovation in entertainment, it’s our lifeblood. How can we delight subscribers in ways no one else can? Foster Diversity & Inclusion (D&I): Our leaders across the Company are committed to furthering Diversity and Inclusion across the company and in our product. How can we further support D&I in our daily routines? Enhance Remote Collaboration: Our teams quickly shifted to a remote work posture in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic. How can we optimize remote collaboration while working from home?

Our senior judging panel was hand picked to ensure wide coverage of all areas of the business. To ensure a fair evaluation across the different tracks, we set out the following criteria on which to judge the teams — scoring each project against each of the following categories:

Impact Innovation Functionality Pragmatism Presentation

With over 40 project submissions and more than 300 participants from across the company, the judges had the very, very difficult job of reviewing the projects and narrowing them down to a few finalists in each track. The finalists then presented their projects live to the entire Disney Streaming organization…. And then, we voted!

Without further ado, here are the winning projects:

TRACK 1: Delighting Subscribers

Pictured above: Brian Owen, Frank McGehee, Hye Jun Lee, Michael Schmutter, Phil Kendall, Stephen Anderson

Team Cinderella — Songs from the Movies

Congratulations to: Brian Owen, Frank McGehee, Hye Jun Lee, Michael Schmutter, Phil Kendall, and Stephen Anderson

Throughout the years, generations have experienced the magic of Pinocchio, Toy Story, Frozen, and Cinderella… to name a few. It’s the animation, the storyline, and the acting that really pulls at our emotions and leaves that everlasting impression. But it’s also the music. It’s the songs that we love to sing over and over again that define the movie and that overarching magical Disney experience. The concept for “Songs from Movies” is to create a “Songs” tab on your favorite Disney movies like Moana, Frozen, and Frozen II, and hear the magical soundtrack right away. Pick which songs you want to listen to over and over again. Here’s what it could look like:

TRACK 2: Diversity and Inclusion

Pictured above: Ariem Anthony, Craig Shank, Monica Kavathekar, Nga Pham, Richard Hong, Mitsy Johnson

Team Darth Vader — Sign Language Interpretation

Congratulations to: Ariem Anthony, Craig Shank, Monica Kavathekar, Nga Pham, Richard Hong, Mitsy Johnson, and Bidejefki Marenco

According to the World Health Organization, 446 Million people have disabling hearing loss and of that, 34 million of those people are children. The concept behind “Sign Language Interpretation” is to explore picture-in-picture support with a focus on sign language for both educational purposes and for deaf or hard of hearing viewers. This innovation could present opportunities to foster diversity and inclusion by continuing to bring Disney magic to historically underserved audiences. Here’s what it could look like:

TRACK 3: Remote Collaboration

Pictured above: Ashley Nguyen, Mark Husson, Hannah Lee, David Pressman, Mason McIntyre, Victoria Teng, Alex Mejias

Team Mater — “Heihei” your Code Pairing Assistant

Congratulations to: Ashley Nguyen, Mark Husson, Hannah Lee, David Pressman, Mason McIntyre, Victoria Teng, and Alex Mejias

Remote work was forced upon a lot of the teams here, and this often makes it difficult to code pair — which is something we’re particularly fond of. “Hands-on keyboard” collaboration is not possible & asking to pair can be daunting for new hires. We want to simplify and streamline the whole process.

The concept behind HeiHei enables employees to quickly start a code pair session with a single slack command, broadcasting the request to the appropriate channel and starting a VSCode live share. From there, other employees can join the pairing session and will be taken straight to their VSCode session. Here’s what it could look like:

If you’d like to be part of our next Hackathon you can find out about our open roles here. We’re always looking for talented people to join our teams, get in touch if you’re interested!