So after a ShipIt, many teams blog about their experience and reflect on what they learned. At Atlassian, we have a culture of sharing our learning. But the ideas don't have to end with the event!įirst, push teams to reflect on lessons learned. Non-winning teams (which typically make up the largest portion of a hackathon) are often left without a clear understanding of what they can do next. One important layer to this is ensuring you close the loop for participants. Love this and thinking about how short bursts of activity in events like a hackathon can get pulled into the longer game of innovation. You will want to be deliberate in the changes you implement, but not allow fear of failure to keep from taking on challenges.Įvery failure presents an opportunity for action in the next hackathon! To Braddock's response, the feedback post-event is a great point of inspiration for improving things on the side of coordination.Įvery hackathon event is a new opportunity to experiment and evolve. Organizers want to create the space for disruptive ideas, allowing for freedom and creativity to flow but with a balance of ensuring it doesn’t feel too constrained or too unstructured. The second part of the challenge is around coordination. Is the event to empower more collaboration, more innovation skill building, more innovative solutions into the hands of customers? Perhaps it does some or all of this, but what is the primary purpose?Ĭonsider the purpose of the event for today and into the future, rather than solely reflecting on the purpose it served previously.įor a hackathon to evolve with intention, answer these questions and get alignment to ensure you are building the right activity. To this point, for any event that is meant to spur innovation, it requires constant innovating.Įvaluating the purpose of the event and reflecting on the impact it has is an important part of the organizer’s work The first is the challenge of evolving an event. I hear two parts of this question and I think they both show the challenge of running programs like a hackathon. If you happen to be a sports fan, then this will probably resonate with you: in the way that they say the best referees / officials are the ones who go unnoticed by the fans, the best internal hackathons are the ones where the “mechanics” go unnoticed by the participants. contractors) for feedback after each ShipIt, and separating the signal from the noise, especially in free-form feedback, can sometimes be a daunting task that is largely invisible to participants. Additionally, we ask the entire company of 8,000+ Atlassians (incl. When that happens, there’s usually a little bit of scrambling but we always try to give ourselves enough lead-time to minimize the number of “fire drills” we have during each ShipIt. And since that is a volunteer role, it’s natural that after a few cycles, the local sponsor / champion is ready to pass the baton to someone else. As a global company, one of the challenges we face at Atlassian is ensuring that there is a local sponsor / champion in each of our geos / time zones. Hey P_ Dela Rosa , great question! Like with any (semi-)mature event, there are lots of “invisible” details that go into planning ShipIt. And in the end, it was more important to preserve the event and pivot to virtual / remote rather than discontinue it on account of COVID.
Put differently, in my opinion, ShipIt is core to Atlassian’s culture.
We have continued to improve over the past 18+ months, which is a good thing because, in retrospect, the biggest lesson I learned was that culture is your heart, not in your hallways. Going from an atmosphere that was primarily office-based to one that was exclusively remote was absolutely the right call but we certainly experienced some “speed bumps” along the way. In the end, we decided to proceed but to pivot to a remote-only event (because, of course, all of our offices were hard-closed). We debated both sides and outlined as many pros/cons as we could imagine. At first, we had to make a fundamental “root” decision: to proceed or cancel. Hi thank you for asking. When COVID forced our global TEAM to shift to WFH in mid-March 2020, we had to pivot quickly because we had a pre-planned ShipIt coming up in mid-April.
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