Appfire employees from across departments, teams and geographies came together recently to celebrate the end of another internal hackathon, called Ignite. The goal of Appfire’s hackathons, held twice each year, is to bring individuals together to spark creativity, innovation, and engagement while increasing collaboration companywide. This most recent hackathon drew 51 teams composed of more than 230 employees — which we call fireflies — from across Appfire functions.
“The goal of this hackathon was to encourage innovation by welcoming diverse groups across our remote-first company to work on a challenge relating to innovation and exploration, improving an existing solution, or providing solutions for the community,” says VP of Product Engineering Bartłomiej Jańczak, who led this year’s program with Software Engineering Manager Lava Kumar Dukanam and a team of internal organizers.
While coming together to solve challenges is exciting, Chief Technology Officer Ed Frederici explains how these hackathons do so much more: “Appfire is composed of individuals who join us from a wide range of backgrounds — through acquisition, the technology industry, the business world and elsewhere. These hackathons bring together entrepreneurial minds from across backgrounds, geographies and roles to innovate and to remind everyone that they are a part of something bigger here at Appfire. They help foster an entrepreneurial spirit and truly bring people together.”
Ed adds that these experiences also provide opportunities for honing other skills: “In the normal course of business there are not many opportunities to present, let alone present to leadership. It’s incredible to see that, across a wide set of languages in use across teams, participants get to practice presenting to executives and get to show off work that they’re really proud of. About 10% of the innovations make it into production, and that’s a big deal.” Ed says the hackathons also give employees a window into how other teams develop products and best practices, which opens them up to additional learning opportunities.
An inclusive and educational experience
With each hackathon, Bartłomiej says the quality of ideas and their execution continue to improve and impress. For this most recent hackathon, the organizers wanted to make the experience even more inclusive for non-engineering teams and individuals. They achieved this by introducing prizes for the top three places in each category, providing more opportunity for recognition for projects that were not engineering-heavy, and introducing the Process Optimization Award to emphasize the importance of continuous improvement.
“Since all departments engage with processes in some form, this focus helped us promote inclusivity while enhancing overall efficiency,” says Bartłomiej. “We’ve also seen more platform-centric thinking in these projects, as well as an increasing number of cross-app integrations that fill feature gaps between apps. All of these concepts are important for fireflies across Appfire to be thinking about.”
During the hackathon week, all participants get that time off to focus solely on their innovations. This recent hackathon included categories for Innovation and Exploration and Continuous Improvement, and a new AI category addressing cross-product integrations using AI, technology exploration with AI, and innovative ideas and proofs of concept using AI. There were also the coveted special awards: Fireflies Choice (voted on completely by the fireflies), Fuegokit (focusing on Appfire’s design system), and Process Improvement. First, second and third-place winners in each category received significant monetary prizes.
“We want the cash prizes to be a meaningful bonus for the winning teams because the potential value of their innovations to the company is so high and the quality of ideas, work, and execution is always exceptional,” says Ed. “Anything that makes it past round one has to add value and be feasible for us to pursue, so the recognition needs to be just as meaningful.”
Participants had access to an advisory board that included leaders from across Appfire functions, and judges were tasked with considering the creativity and originality of ideas, the extent to which an innovation can address a need for customers or fireflies, and how well a team shows the value of their idea. Judges also considered how well each team worked together remotely and the diversity of each team setup.
Coming together with passion and purpose
At the end of the hackathon, a final virtual presentation and awards ceremony was held and the entire company was invited to celebrate the hard work of the participants and advisors and learn about the winning ideas. In addition to monetary prizes for the winning teams, all participants received Appfire swag as well as plenty of praise and excitement from their friends, colleagues, and leaders across the company through Appfire’s Slack channels.
One hack in particular — HACK-223, “Integrations Hub - The NextGen to integrate it all” — impressed the judges across three categories and received the Fireflies Choice Award, Fuegokit Award, and Innovation and Exploration category’s first-place win.
"Our team dove headfirst into the hackathon, collaborating seamlessly and going above and beyond to deliver the Integrations Hub — an innovative, scalable platform designed to connect application lifecycle and Appfire applications effortlessly,” says Principal Product Manager Julia Hall. “The synergy was perfect; every member brought their A-game, innovating and working as one to make this vision a reality. It was an exhilarating experience, showcasing what we can achieve when we come together with passion and purpose.”
Indeed, the energy around these hackathons and the impact of the innovations that stem from them is inspiring. With increasing participation, the organizers are committed to enhancing the hackathon experience for everyone each time by actively listening to feedback and incorporating it into future programs.
“The work continues after each hackathon,” says Ed. “We run analytics to understand team compositions, look at the state of the business to help determine new categories, and conduct a post mortem with the full company to make sure the experience benefits not only Appfire but each individual participant so they can continue to have the time and space to experience community and ignite innovation.”