Hack Days are fun, no doubt, but what about getting hacks out the door? Yahoo!'s hack culture has been a blast to be part of, but one of the biggest challenges is integrating the great hacks into products and shipping them. After all, product roadmaps are big, and there's always an appetite to do more - would you want it any other way? But, given the size of these roadmaps, it’s not always easy for hack teams to know how to proceed after a hack day. And getting hacks productized is one of the best aspects of the hack program. So, here are some tactics to make that happen....
I’ve been running various flavors of an “enhanced” hack program in my part of the Yahoo! world for almost three years. Borne out of experiments that began while I was managing the Y! Autos engineering team, this program has evolved into these three core aspects:
1. Three-Day Hack Events
Picking the right timeframe for a hack event is key for bringing forward the best hacks while minimally impacting the roadmap. One-day hack events generated lots of very small hacks and proved difficult for hackers to conceive, design, and build something lasting. We tried a one-week-long event at one point in Y! Shopping, but it proved too disruptive to roadmap-focused activities. We settled on three-day events to drive bigger hacks. These three-day events give the teams time to coalesce, commit to a larger idea, and have the time to build it.
2. Business feedback and hack ratings (“H-ratings”)
After the hacks are initially presented in a fun open-call demos/prizes session, each business unit’s cross-functional leadership team (including the GM, product lead, eng lead, design lead, bizdev lead, etc.) meet with the hackers who built hacks for their particular area (e.g., Yahoo! Local).
Hackers then do their demos again, followed by the whole group having an in-depth discussion where “bullet point” level feedback is given and scribed. The leadership team gives each hack a rating, called an H-Rating, which is one of:
The leadership team takes a bias towards approving things for release (“H1”) whenever possible.
We’ve shipped some major hacks with this process:
3. Time to productize
Innovation experts are quick to point out that slack time is essential to innovating. I’m aware of a number of groups at Yahoo! that have tried various things to bring in slack time, such as "Friday afternoon hacking" for all engineers, one-off allocations of 1+ engineers for specific innovative projects, and my own personal favorite – the hack time grant program. With the time grant program, 15% of the engineering team’s time is reserved for innovation work. The engineering managers pool 15% of the team’s time on a quarterly basis; for example, calculating that in a team of 12 engineers, they can spend 25 engineering-weeks per quarter on innovation. This is not an “entitlement” that every engineer gets. Instead, it is time that any engineer can apply for through a one-page email request. The engineering managers review grant requests periodically and they spend the 15% budget every quarter. They can use it to invest in key areas, reward exciting innovations with move development time, and work on getting cool things out the door. In a mystery competitor’s 20% innovation time program (sometimes called a 120% program :D), I’ll hazard a guess that only 20% of the engineers participate, so they net only a 4% innovation investment.
The business value of the grant program is huge:
I have been using time grants for my teams since early 2006. The engineers I work with appreciate that they can get time to work on projects without having to deal with the “unknown” factor, which includes having to negotiate for time in a team’s business roadmap. We are now exploring expanding the grant program to other sibling teams in our org.
In our efforts, the design, product management, QA, and release engineering teams support the program as much as they can. While they aren’t yet formally allocating a percentage of their time, they do help us get hacks into products – especially when they are part of a hack team.
So what’s next for the whole program?
Due to the success of this program in my organization, we're now working on getting the program more widely adopted. Also, I’m looking into whether a “Hack Maturity Model” (a la CMM) might be a good way to clarify various levels of hack sophistication across the company, to correlate success in building and shipping hacks with a set of best practices. “HMM1” might be just participating in corporate hack days, whereas “HMM4” might be H-ratings, formal slack program, and shipping all H1’s within three months. I'll keep you posted on how these go.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Michael Olivier, August 5th, 2008 on 10:58 am
Last week, the Fire Eagle development team hosted an informal evening meetup at Yahoo!'s Brickhouse office to share news about Fire Eagle, a system that brokers location information and helps users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet. Fire Eagle launched at ETech earlier this month.
In this video, Tom Coates describes some of the first Fire Eagle apps that are emerging, like an integration with Dopplr and a plugin for Movable Type, and shares ideas and imaginings for new location-aware services.
Popularity: 62% [?]
Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Jeremy Zawodny spoke with Paul Donnelly from the Pipes team about the new Pipes badges that launched today. A badge is a simple way to display the output of your favorite Yahoo! Pipe on your website or blog.
There are three types of Pipes badges you can add like widgets to your webpage or blog: the map badge, when there's geocoded data; an image badge that includes slideshow functionality; and a list badge, for all other valid data. Help us spot the first generation of creative Pipes badges out in the wild, by posting your badge sightings and URLs in comments here. Read more about this release or watch this video introduction:
Popularity: 62% [?]
The times they are a changing. This year the politics of fear go head to head with the audacity of hope. Democrats have come out in record numbers to vote in the presidential primaries and caucuses to date. The current Democratic front runner, Barack Obama, has inspired a new generation of young and independent voters. Both he and Hillary Clinton are promoting plans which would help create a more fair and equitable United States.
But the race between Obama and Hillary Clinton is very close. No matter what happens in Pennsylvania or any of the other remaining states, neither candidate will have clinched the nomination when all the voting is finished in June. The next presidential candidate will be determined by the remaining Democratic superdelegates.
No matter who is chosen, it will be a proud and groundbreaking moment for the United States. If a Democrat is elected, the next US president will be either a woman or a black man.
If you were a superdelegate, how would you vote? The Yahoo! Media Innovation Group has built an app called Be a Superdelegate, which runs on both Facebook and MySpace. It lets you cast your own superdelegate vote and show support for your presidential pick by putting a virtual campaign button on your Facebook or MySpace profile page. What’s especially fun about the Superdelegate app is that a vote you cast on MySpace will appear on Facebook and vice versa. Like the Texas prima-caucus, you can even vote twice – once on each network.
Earlier this month, MySpace went live with their application platform, which supports OpenSocial. Now we’re starting to see the emergence of cross platform social apps – a pretty cool development. Could it be that leading Internet companies large and small can work together and share content and data to make the Web a better place for everyone? Yes we can. Yes we can.
Be a Superdelegate today!
Hillary Obama battle by mr_magoo
Popularity: 53% [?]
William White, March 21st, 2008 on 4:34 pm
Superdelegates have enormous power in the 2008 US Presidential election. Voters have already cast millions of votes for the Democratic nominee, but neither candidate will have enough votes to win outright. It looks like a few hundred superdelegate votes will determine whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton faces off against John McCain in the US election later this year.
Be a Superdelegate is an app that runs on either Facebook or MySpace and lets you cast your own superdelegate vote. Follow the results of all superdelegate voting in real time on our interactive map and show support for your favorite candidate by displaying their badge on your profile page.
Don't let your candidate lose this all important superdelegate race! Add this app today and get your friends to vote too!
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Popularity: 59% [?]
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