Most of the time, the product and engineering teams here at Grubhub build new features, pay down tech debt, and improve support systems through an agile, but very organized, initiative process. “We set quarterly goals at a company level and let the teams execute,” said Maria Belousova, Grubhub’s CTO. “For the most part, this is a really good process. That’s how prioritization works, right? But it’s often that people have ideas or they desire to try something that doesn’t completely fit in the initiative framework. Fundamentally, a hackathon gives people an opportunity to work on something that they believe in but have a hard time scheduling outside of the normal day-to-day workstream.” Our hackathon was a chance for the people who build Grubhub to take time away from their deliverables, releases, and KPIs, and turn towards their personal wishlists. All regular sprints and meetings were put on hold. We were asked to put our creative hats on, think outside of the box, and innovate.

“We’re a creative bunch of people and a hackathon provides an outlet that allows us to express that creativity in a different way,” said Matt Sage, Director, Product Management. “It gives teams a chance to solve problems when you can’t always see a complete link between why solving that problem is important to the general Grubhub business.”

For years, we had talked about running a hackathon, but the timing never seemed right. “We really decided we were going to do the weeklong hackathon I’d say sixty days out,” said Sanjay Uttam, Senior Director, Software Engineering. “We were just waiting until it made sense. We had some big projects wrapping up, especially in my org. We didn’t want to increase the latency, so we landed on doing it the week before the Fourth of July.”

Sixty days isn’t much time to plan a hackathon for over one thousand people located across six offices, plus remote employees. Clark Malmgren, our Senior Director of Software Engineering, previously worked at a company with a strong hackathon culture and so had some understanding of what it takes to pull an event like this together. “But that was just one office in the Valley,” he said. “For us to coordinate across six offices — and one that’s international — this was, quite frankly, on a much bigger scale.”

Organizing a hackathon in sixty days

So how did we do it? While some initial discussions happened in the first half of that two month window, the shape of the hackathon really only came together in those last thirty days. Discussions about day-to-day schedules, project development and team recruiting, judging and awards — and most importantly, what snacks would be served — all coalesced into a twenty-five page document jointly edited by the Hackathon Council, a group of volunteers from the leadership team who would manage the logistics of the week and route teams to Hackathon Coaches, who had specific domain knowledge about how Grubhub worked on a tech and product level.

A few weeks before the hackathon, we opened up a Jira board where anyone could post their project idea. Team leads could flood the #hackathon Slack channel with requests for skilled volunteers, and those volunteers would post a subtask on the original project ticket.

For the hackathon week itself, we’d have a kickoff breakfast on Monday with additional recruiting and planning, then two solid days of hacking, a project presentation run-off on Thursday afternoon, and the finals and award ceremony on Friday. Malmgren recorded a few how-to videos, created a sample project, and sent out information in a small, internal drip campaign to build excitement. “The technology leadership team and I did a lot of work to prepare and run the hackathon,” said Belousova. “During the hackathon, that’s all we did: organizing, making sure that there’s enough working space for teams, there’s the food, there’s the ability for folks to recruit the right teams, that everybody knew what was happening, figuring out how to communicate the structure, and how to organize it, and later the judging, prizes and the trophies.”

With that framework and planning in place, it was time to turn the hackathon over to the team. “We wanted it to be be pretty free-flowing,” said Uttam. “We wanted people to have fun and not feel like this was some other flavor of work. But we also didn’t want it to be complete anarchy for an entire week. Some anarchy is fine. It’s figuring out that balance.”

Now it was time for participants to get hacking.

“Insanely impressive”

The turnout shocked even the organizers, with around eight hundred people working on 131 projects over the course of the week. “I was expecting to see half the projects I saw,” said Sage. “Having been involved in these things in the past, I expected some teams to play at the same level of everyone that was involved here, and then a bunch of teams that weren’t involved, and a bunch of people that just didn’t want to engage in any way. I got the complete opposite. I got way more engagement than I expected.”

The decision to open up project planning early kept the hackathon week focused on actual hacking. “We hit the ground running on Monday when people basically knew what they were working on,” said Uttam. “Turns out when you get a bunch of engineers that feel like they are working on the things that they want to be working on, you actually don’t need to get involved much.”

Arguably even more crucial than the pre-planning was the organization-wide commitment to the event. “We were able to put all of our meetings on hold for a week,” said Michelle Sasson, a Senior Software Engineer. “It was announced, but I honestly couldn’t believe that held up.”

That total commitment allowed our hackathon teams to run wild, try new things, and stretch their comfort levels. “Pretty much our entire team had never worked on any of the services/front-end we were making changes to and it was cool to get our hands dirty with them,” said Sasson.

So what about the features and functionality that these teams were able to produce in less than a week? “The results far exceeded my expectations of what we could produce,” raved Uttam. “You don’t generally have visibility into what the breadth of a skill set is across the company. At the end of the week, we had a bunch of pretty impressive hardware hacks, very impressive native hacks, augmented reality, and projects using readily available technologies that we don’t typically leverage on our platform today.”

The hackathon encouraged people to take chances and pursue any path they could imagine. And it paid off. Peter Foti, who appeared in his presentation video as “Delivery Dave,” was part of a team that learned as they worked. “None of us really had any experience in making a video, but our designer did a great job. None of us had experience making AR.” And yet his team won first place in the People’s Choice category.

With so many fantastic projects, how to choose a winner?

Given the sheer number of innovative projects, picking just one winner turned out to be impossible. So the judging standards and awards had to evolve with the rest of the process. “How do you judge a hundred-and-thirty-something ideas?” said Belousova. “Even if you give each idea just five minutes, you’re pretty much doing demos the whole day. And if you don’t win, you still want to give every team the venue and opportunity to share their ideas because what if it’s a really, really great idea and we want to sponsor it anyway?”

We ran semi-finals in each of our five office locations on Thursday, then overall finals all day on Friday. In the end, there were a total of twelve winners. Our judges selected first, second, and third place winners, and then we held a company-wide “People’s Choice” vote so all of Grubhub could vote. As for the final six, “We actually created more categories of winners to make sure that we could recognize more of the good ideas,” said Uttam. “Maria and I were in a room looking at presentations from teams across the country until 7pm. If that was my job all day, that’d be incredible, because I’m just looking at awesome ideas all day.”

There were three types of projects that tended to win. The first were tech projects that would never have gotten sponsorship, as they’re harder to explain than to simply get done. The second were crazy features that nobody in their right mind would have added to the schedule, but once you saw the prototype in action, it didn’t seem so unreal. Last were things that were broken that nobody had time to fix or add to sprints. “I expected a lot of really shiny but not super applicable to business ideas, but what I saw were many, many ideas that were actually deeply thought through and focused on value to the business, like how to ingest restaurant information in bulk to make our sales teams’ lives easier,” said Belousova.

We wanted to properly celebrate all this amazing work, but doing so with a cash gift card is not particularly special. Instead, winners got to throw a company-sponsored party for their team and friends, and plaques with the winning teams’ names were added to each of the large trophies that have pride of place in our offices; every year we’ll add a new plaque. “Those trophies will be marked with their team names as a living testament to their greatness in perpetuity,” said Malmgren.

Hackathons are prototyping machines

“I was glad I had the opportunity to work on a passion project that was a bit of a risk,” said Russell Foxworthy, a Product Manager, whose team placed first in the Hackathon. “However, we were pleasantly surprised with the final outcome and are thrilled to be able to push the feature to production next month.”

That’s right: twenty or so projects have been or will eventually be implemented in products, and at least one project to improve architecture is already in our production environment. “A lot of the ideas that we used the hackathon to make headway on will very likely make it to production in some shape or form,” said Uttam. “Some of them are so practical and useful that it’s just a no-brainer.”

“Either the result or the genesis of the idea was strong enough to provoke a let’s-get-this-done attitude to put it on the roadmap,” said Sage. “It may not be the same code that was produced in the hackathon, but it’s still the value of the hackathon that produced it.”

Now that our first hackathon was a success, we plan to host them every six months. “I think this is a nice balance between stuff that we know we want to deliver versus just seeing what people have floating around their head,” said Uttam. “Writing off time lines for a week every six months for the morale boost is a very easy equation.” Sage agreed. “It’s good to shift the focus of an entire organization once in a while. It’s like when you go on vacation. It’s something new and it helps reinvigorate people.”