The power of regular hackathons
Tags: hackathon, green, innovate, experiment
Published: 2023-03-24 14:23:04

At Vandebron we have been organizing a regular hackathon for the last four years. Every three months we organize a two-day event. At first glance this seems quite an investment. Eight days a year, almost losing two working-weeks of productivity for your teams!

Our company is like any other. Our roadmaps are stuffed, our backlogs are never-ending and pressure for delivering value to our customers is always present. Our ambitions are always higher than what we can handle with the amount of teams and people available. We like to say: ‘the energy transition can’t wait!’, but we sure do have to prioritize our projects very carefully.

However this does not stop us from organizing our quarterly hackathons. Most of the time our regular hackathons are light-weight. People within the company know how it works. We try not to waste too much time in ‘organizing’ the event. We get right to it.

Reasons why you should be organizing (regular) hackathons:

- Fun - this reason does not need much explanation. Working on challenging, fun and creative ideas with uncertain outcome in a not-business-as-usual way. It makes you step out of your daily comfort zone and explore new things.

- Walk the extra mile - Some team-members will have the energy, enthusiasm and commitment to use their spare time to fuel their curiosity and bring new insights to the workplace. These are the same people that you also expect to walk the extra mile if the team- or company objectives are at stake. This is in that same spare time! But in the end, if you value your teams to continuously think about new ideas, insights and work on out-of-the-box ideas, it is not a weird idea to create this environment within the company.

- Bottled up energy - our people are focused on reaching goals and objectives. Every day, every week and every sprint the focus is clear. This also means that there is not always time for creative or high risk escapades that could hurt the overall team objectives. This might give an unsatisfied feeling to people. If the bottled up energy can not be released, engineers might get frustrated. But maybe even more important, you might be missing opportunities for the company.

- Cross team collaboration - in an agile way of working the concept of the team is very important. At Vandebron we focus on teams staying together for a long period of time. This makes the relationship between individuals stronger, the knowledge of the product deeper and the team as a whole more effective. However, the company is bigger than your team. There might be different ways of connecting with other people within your company, but a hackathon is an ideal way of linking yourself up with people that you can learn from. It can really bring you new insights as an individual, and it will also be an investment for improved cross-team collaboration going forward.

- Learning organisation - as mentioned, hackathons give you an excellent opportunity to learn new things. For yourself, but definitely also for the company. In my experience I often see that topics get selected that have high-risk and high-reward kind of characteristics. These topics can be scary to touch, which make you go out of your comfort zone. This is where you learn the most! These high-risk and high-reward projects are also very likely to fail, meaning that the reward is not as high as expected, or the complexity and risks are even greater than anticipated. At these moments the pressure-cooker of a hackathon is very valuable, because it forces the participants to draw conclusions in a short time-frame. The insights gained from these projects can be used to further steer the roadmap. And last but not least, it supports building a culture of being bold enough to try new things, and fail fast. I’ve noticed this is appreciated by a lot of people within the company and the hackathon contributes to a culture of innovation.

## Our most important learnings over the years

- Spotlights on - It is good to put teams and their results in the spotlight. Let them take the podium and make sure there is an audience. However don’t make it too much about winning. Ideas that have completely failed are just as important as over-engineered fancy product demos. At Vandebron we like to declare ‘winners’ in different categories: ‘Fun & Original’, ’Impactful’, ‘Exploration & Learning’ and ‘Technical achievement’.

- Harvest your ideas continuously - during normal work and life you hit those topics that you would like to investigate a bit deeper. But while you stumble upon such a topic you don’t have the time to dive into it. So therefore, write your idea down and publish it in the ‘hackathon-idea-box’ for everyone to see! It might already give you some good conversations during coffee or lunch, and it might already generate you some people that would like to join forces with you during the hackathon. Because rest assured, a new hackathon is always coming up!

- To-theme-or-not-to-theme - we have experimented with adding a theme to a hackathon. It can help the company to generate ideas and action in a certain area of interest. It also helps to generate more focus within the company on a certain persistent challenge that we feel deserves a solution. Although everyone will be working on different sub-topics the full event will be experienced as more correlated and unified. But be careful not to push normal business-projects disguised as hackathon projects to your teams. This goes against the basic concept of a hackathon. At Vandebron we sometimes pick a theme if we would like to motivate people to think about ideas in a certain direction. But most of the time we keep it open.
Participation is optional. - At Vandebron we have autonomous teams with professionals that can manage their own agenda. As a team and as an individual. We put effort in promoting the hackathon by trying to make people enthusiastic about participating. But in the end people make their own decisions. Sometimes the team and company objectives do need to have priority, but the teams are perfectly able to make this judgement call themselves.

- Magnify impact - show everyone what the impact is they have been making. It is good if people recognize how some projects have become reality and that feedback will be appreciated by the community. It gives people a feeling that the podium of the hackathon is a strong force. And ultimately that is how you also proof the value of organizing a hackathon.
For our next hackathon we are opening our (virtual) doors also for guests, as we are organizing a GreenTech hackathon with other sustainability minded companies (‘Hack the Planet’ and ‘Top Dutch Solar Racing’). You can find more information and sign up via this link. It is the first time we do it like this, and we sure will learn another thing or two!