Medallia Hackathon: Celebrating Innovation
Over the years at Medallia, we've been able to organically cultivate innovation. No one needs permission to think outside the box; it's in our blood. So when we recently held our first Hackathon—ten years into the company's existence—it wasn't so much to encourage innovation, but rather to celebrate the very thing we've always done.
We added a twist to our Hackathon (which we'll get to shortly), but traditionally Hackathons are engineering-centric events: 24 sleep-deprived hours in which coders bang out the ones and zeros, and in the end some small glorious innovation transpires.
We hacked on lots of things, but a couple to note:
We Hacked Mobile
We have a reputation for our industry-leading mobile apps, and during the Hackathon we took the opportunity to expand into push notifications and position our platform to better support HTML5. This of course made our mobile initiative more buzzword compliant, but more important, it made our tools more accessible to a wider audience.
We Hacked Maps
Perhaps the highlight of the day was the maps hack. As we've grown, it's been difficult to keep up with all the new employees and where they sit. We'd been managing this with an (albeit impressive) shared spreadsheet. But at our Hackathon, some engineers bested the spreadsheet by integrating Google Maps with our employee Wiki. (Click on the screenshot to get an idea of why we're so excited about it!)
We Hacked Rooms
Yup, the twist was we incorporated the entire company, from accountants to executives—everyone hacked on something, and some hacked rooms. We've got nearly as many conference rooms as there are countries, and if we have an employee contingent from a country, it earns a room name. (Make sense?) Anyway, "Norway" got hacked with minimalistic Scandinavian furniture, painted landscapes and silhouettes of skiers, and, most important, an electric fireplace to make all the other conference rooms jealous.
A Great Success
The whole event was a blast. And although you can't superficially create innovation, Hackathons allow a unique opportunity to celebrate it. Getting the whole company on board was a huge success, and we're looking forward to our next Hackathon soon.