How Hackathons Can Drive Velocity and Disrupt Your Product Roadmap
Hackathons are a time honored tradition of many tech companies. They’re a time for everyone to break free from their day to day work and innovate. Here at Amplitude, hackathons have been a great way of bypassing the traditional processes of product development to disrupt our own roadmap, as well as an opportunity to foster cross functional teamwork and relationships. We’ve taken to doing a hackathon at the start of every quarter, and are coming hot off of our third with some fresh ideas and ambitious projects.
The Amplitude Hackathon is a three day event, kicking off with a pitch session the day before a hackathon starts. Individuals and teams can pitch their ideas for the hackathon and recruit others to join their cause. The Hackathon kicks into full gear Wednesday through Friday, culminating in demos on Friday afternoon. In the spirit of competition, we also award projects based on an audience vote, and for being outstanding in focus areas like killing customer pain, shipping fast, and creativity. The winners receive prizes ranging from smart watches to spa certificates to drones.
Ampliteers work on everything from bringing natural language querying to Amplitude, to automating the creation of order forms with a click of a button. And during this time our values shine — projects are driven with a sharp customer focus, a desire to ship quickly, and through cross team effort. The following are a few of the projects that highlight this spirit in our Hackathons.
“A much easier way to learn how to use Amplitude”
Dana, an applications engineer, and Jenny, a UX designer, stand up on stage about to share their creation, “Walkthroughs”. Dana starts with the problem, “Analytics is hard. Amplitude is hard. So, I’m going to show you a much easier way to learn how to use Amplitude features.” And he dives into a demo. He opens a basic analysis. “Woah, what’s that?” The screen grays and highlights the first step. And the audience immediately gets it.
Dana, Jenny, and their teammate Ran, another UX designer, have created a fully working version of an in product guided walkthrough for our funnel analysis chart. The walkthrough interacts directly with Amplitude’s UI and teaches a newcomer to Amplitude how to navigate the many dropdowns, fields, and controls that allow for powerful self service analysis. It’s interactive, unintrusive, and extensible to other charts. “There’s already the ability to launch a walkthrough from any place in the app,” Dana boldly claims. Not bad for a couple days of work!
Walkthroughs won the award for the best driver of customer adoption. But their work is not yet done. The team is continuing their work to build out more complete walkthroughs and make the feature a reality for Amplitude users in the future.
“There’s no localhost stuff going on!”
Varun, a customer success manager, and Jin, a backend engineer, have identified an opportunity to make one of our analyses, Pathfinder, even more powerful. Pathfinder is a very useful tool for getting a bird’s eye view of your product and seeing common user paths. But in some products where the same actions are repeated in a row, the visualization can be uninteresting. Varun shows an example where you can see users perform a “Page View”, followed by a “Page View”, followed by … another “Page View”.
The team sought to fix that problem and implemented a way to collapse repeated events, to expose more meaningful user paths. It was a conceptually simple change that added power to a unique feature in Amplitude. Jin demos a before and after on game data, and the visual difference is clear. On top of that, “it’s actually live on production, there’s no localhost stuff going on!” Varun exclaims.
Collapsed Pathfinder won an award for Best Customer Pain Killer, an award that embodies our operating principle of Customer Painkilling. And in the spirit of shipping quickly–Velocity is another operating principle–we officially released it to all customers the following Monday!
This is just one of many features that have shipped coming out of a hackathon. Usage reports, commenting, and browse chart search are all features that have benefitted Amplitude users that have grown out of previous hackathons. Usage reports, in particular, is used by over 60% of organizations every month.
“I just lost 3 hours of my life playing this. I am going to continue playing till I regain that”
Halfway through the hackathon, a crowd starts to form around Kevin’s desk. The high score counts up — 858, 859, 860. Kevin is close to beating the high score in a game he helped create. The graphics are partially incomplete, the bounding boxes are still visible, but it doesn’t matter. The game is addictive and everyone is there to witness a new record.
Kevin, a backend engineer, has been working on DATAExplorer, a game with members from all organizations of Amplitude: marketing, engineering, design, and customer success. The game, modeled after the Halfbrick Studios hit Jetpack Joyride, is designed to showcase Amplitude’s realtime functionality. Data from the game can be viewed and analyzed in Amplitude within minutes, and it’s easy to see the best ships, the most popular ships, and the most difficult points in the game, among other insights.
We loved the games so much, some of us spent much of the evening and following week after the hackathon competing for the highest score and even implementing improvements. When two Ampliteers got into a heated record battle, one remarked, “It seems both of us won’t be able to be productive at the same time going forward.” We think the game will give people a bit of fun while learning about Amplitude at the same time.
It was a truly cross team effort — marketing developed the concept, engineering implemented the game, design provided the assets and game sprites, and customer success playtested for fun. We see a lot of cross team collaboration arise in our hackathons, between organizations, and between engineering teams. For example, Will, an applications engineer, gladly lent his time and expertise to Nirmal, a backend engineer, to help him learn React, our front end framework, and create different onboarding views for his project. With Will’s help, Nirmal and his hackathon project-mate Dan were able to create, Sorting Hat, a way of providing different experiences to different users based on their profile.
It’s amazing what can be created and shipped without the structure of a product roadmap and with the urgency of demoing something after three days. Some projects are released to production soon after like Collapsed Pathfinder. Other projects became full-fledged pods that have dedicated resources and a timeline on our roadmap. Hackathons are one way product teams can disrupt their own roadmap and accelerate innovation without the restraints of process. I can’t wait for the time when that work is released and starts providing value to our customers!
If you’re an engineer and enjoy this kind of stuff, we’re hiring and we’d love to talk to you!
