Hack Week has turn into one thing of Spotify lore. The beloved Discover Weekly playlist originated as a Hack Week concept, as did the power to exclude choose playlists out of your Taste Profile. Now Spotify staff throughout capabilities worldwide stay up for the annual week the place they put their common work apart and collaborate on concepts that mix their passions, creativity, and abilities. But creating Hack Week into the large occasion that hundreds of Spotify staff take part in yearly is a feat in itself.
According to Sarah Gänsicke and Nanci Veitch, Spotify Project Managers for R&D Communities, Hack Week began out as a “hot potato” within the early days of the corporate. “Each year it had the same skeleton—a kick-off event, a week of hacking, a fair, and local People’s Choice awards, but no repeatable format from a project management perspective,” Sarah shared. As Spotify matured, its groups turned Hack Week right into a full-scale expertise with a devoted inside web site, Skill Exchange portal (itself a Hack Week venture), a developed visible identification, and an inside communications marketing campaign to generate pleasure and unfold data. “What has been great about the intentional scaling and effort behind the program is that it’s created a space for Hack Week to exist all year round rather than just being an engineering event that happens somehow every year,” mentioned Nanci. Hack Week has additionally expanded to incorporate non-R&D staff and now has “a long legacy throughout the company.”
The advantages of Hack Week—offering alternatives to collaborate exterior of 1’s on a regular basis crew, giving staff flexibility to enhance upon the product, providing methods to stretch past consolation zones—are infinite. Nanci and Sarah supplied 5 considerate tricks to groups and firms trying to host their very own hack weeks.
- Create devoted program administration and identification. Though our core occasion has principally stayed the identical all through the years, having a course of that’s pushed by a schedule and a set of ideas has allowed us to make enhancements to our communications, scale back boundaries to entry, and enhance the convenience of participation for a various group of contributors. For instance, we developed a Hack Hub the place staff can discover hack concepts, explanations on methods to be a part of a crew, and examples for an incredible hack. We even have a devoted visible identification for Hack Week, which has helped to encourage and appeal to non-R&D staff.
- Be inclusive. It’s not simply who will get concerned, however the way you’re opening the door to them. We’ve enabled staff worldwide to affix Hack Week by holding a principally digital occasion that abides by our distributed first ideas. This yr, now we have hackers representing most of our international workplaces. We’ve additionally discovered methods to make sure Hack Week isn’t just for engineers. Members throughout many disciplines now interact in Hack Week. We encourage this by spotlighting nontraditional hacks and roles like person researchers, product designers, and music crew members to allow them to see obtainable alternatives. Encouragingly, we’ve discovered that people who be a part of Hack Week are over 50% extra prone to do it once more.
- Make the themes progressive and provoking. This yr’s theme is “The Future Is . . .” and it builds on a base of big-picture concepts impressed by suggestions from Spotify leaders. We suggest connecting the Hack Week theme again to your organization’s core identification and priorities, but it surely’s additionally essential to make the theme broad sufficient to permit for artistic interpretation. With a robust theme, folks imagine they’re setting their very own mission. “We want to set the stage for hacks that push boundaries,” Nanci and Sarah famous.
- Step out of your consolation zone. Hack Week is brief, leaving many initiatives left unfinished—and that’s a part of the great thing about the week. Goal-setting throughout Hack Week takes many varieties however doesn’t essentially embody completion of the product. Hackers are inspired to embrace the Spotify worth of playfulness and make the most of the week to get out of their day-to-day roles. We additionally suggest connecting and dealing with people exterior of 1’s direct realm. This actually permits Hack Week to be a instrument for interpersonal connection in addition to a significant skilled expertise.
- Don’t be afraid to herald exterior views. This goes for contributors and coordinators. Hack Week is a collaboration between Spotify’s devoted Hack Week crew and Say It Good Studio, a branding and communications studio that created and constructed Spotify’s Hack Week hub. “We treat Hack Week internally as if it’s an external campaign, keeping track of click-through rates and the like,” defined Sarah. “Having an external partner helps us avoid our biases, maintain good communication, and ensure it’s a more accessible process for everyone in the organization.”
Over the years, we’ve additionally introduced inspirational figures into Hack Week to assist our groups get enthusiastic about hacking. Notable artists concerned in our inside marketing campaign challenged hackers to “make space” forward of Hack Week 2021 and “make the planet cooler” throughout Hack Week 2022.
Like any good venture, there’s all the time room for enchancment. “One challenge that we’re still working through is that it’s hard to follow hacks from Hack Week to reality,” Nanci defined. “We began methodically tracking Hack Week projects in 2022 to address this and now use our Skill Exchange as a library to keep a close eye on projects that continue into development.”
As for what the way forward for Hack Week at Spotify holds—we’ll depart that to the hackers to find out.