We did the unthinkable and paused everything to have a hackday

Last week we had a hack day to address small pain points in our product. The team took a step away from their regularly scheduled project work and tackled a variety of small tickets that smoothed over sharp edges. 

Pausing work and switching context can be tough, but it can also be a welcome breath of fresh air. While we’ve been focusing on shipping large features within our teams, we haven’t had much time to work on extraneous requests. During hackdays, we can do just that! 

As engineers, we benefit from getting a different perspective on our product. We learn about our customers’ experiences, and we gain exposure to technical domains beyond the usual scope of our team’s work. We also really enjoy completing “quick wins” that bring immediate satisfaction to our customers. 

We hosted our hackday fully remotely 

As a fully distributed team, hackdays look a bit different. Here’s what we did: 

1. Our Customer Success team created a spreadsheet of customer asks. This spreadsheet included information like feature description, pain index, difficulty, and who’s taking it on.
2. Everyone used a dedicated hackday Slack channel to discuss their hackday work, for example, pairing requests, early previews, and so on. 
3. Folks used a separate spreadsheet for organizing demos. In addition to presenters’ names and project descriptions, we included info about project readiness and next steps. 
4. And of course we had a team lunch over Zoom :) 

We hacked on the first Monday of a sprint, and demoed our work the following morning. Afterwards, we kicked off our sprints and returned to our usual work. 

We accomplished some amazing quick wins   

In the end, we had: 

• 17 amazing demos from contributors on 5 engineering teams and beyond 
• 9 features that were shippable at the time of the demo
• 4 proofs of concept that can become more detailed project proposals   
• 8 features that have a clear path to completion and are moving forward to next steps 
• 1 feature that’s already in production: a “repository exists” service filter

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Keep your eyes peeled for our June release notes to see everything we ship this month. Not an OpsLevel user yet? Start a free trial.