What I learned from my first Hackathon project
By: Yayun Jin
Tags: Microsoft, Hackathons, Professional Development

In the week of Nov 2, I joined my first hackathon project at Microsoft. There were more than 30 people getting involved in this project across multiple teams. In the short five days, I have learned so much about cross-team collaboration, a deeper understanding of Diversity and Inclusion, how to get my voice heard, and many more!

This project was created to deepen our understanding of how different demographics experience our projects and services. We had in total 7 tracks and each track targeted a research question. In my track, we focused on the correlation between the usage of office products and demographics data. We found many interesting insights: customers in some specific age/gender groups use a product more often than other age/gender groups; the engagement and retention rate is skewed towards a specific age/gender group, etc. Those insights help us better understand our customers’ experiences and improve our products & service. Diversity and inclusion have been our company-wide shared core priority and value. This project is a great practice of the value and also the Microsoft mission — empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

When I was working on this project, I also had my day job to finish and was struggling over the priorities. Not only myself, but also my teammates were trying hard to balance the project, day jobs, and other urgencies as well. When I was busy with my day job, my teammates would continue the work that I had been working on. I never imagined that the collaboration could be so smooth!

In addition, I learned that the key to team success is leveraging the strengths of each other. For example, I am proficient in data visualization so I immediately volunteered to take on the visualization part of the project. It was a great opportunity for me to practice and apply my expertise in a new business scenario, and I feel more confident about my expertise after this hackathon.

Another key to the success of completing a task in a very short time period is taking accountability. I never felt the accountability so strong in my work before, as my day job did not directly rely much on other colleagues’ work. However, every piece of the work in this hackathon project is closely connected: someone needs to pull the aggregated data together; then another one creates the visualization and reports; next, someone will take a close look at the reports to generate insights and provide feedback to the first and second person to make further changes.

Lastly, I learned some good practices of leading a team by observing how leaders managing the whole team with 30+ people. It is a great idea to split the team into smaller teams/tracks and nominate leads for each track. Also, timely communication is important, especially for tackling blockers and challenges. In addition, the expectation set at the beginning may not be met due to data access or other issues. When it happens, the leaders’ ability to adjust the expectation will save lots of time and make sure that a desirable outcome will happen.

It was an amazing experience! I want to quote my own words in the final team report to end this article:

“This is my first hack project and I love my team so much! We maximize each other’s strengths to achieve a shared goal. We, as a team, are actually practicing diversity and inclusiveness in this hack, and also help Microsoft’s products embrace D&I! This spirit and practice will continue in my daily work :)”