Origin’s Hackathon Culture
Hackathon culture is a core part of Origin’s DNA.
When I mentioned to my (non-technical) sister that we'd be holding a hackathon at the office, she laughed so hard that she practically choked on her drink! Honestly, I completely understand why.
But by the time I’d finished explaining what hackathons are and why they’re a core part of our engineering DNA, she’d completely changed her tune.
Negative connotations
Hackathons are misunderstood in popular culture. In fact, anything ‘hacking’ related is considered anti-social, greasy haired, the domain of incels sitting around trying to break into computers. Hackathons at Origin couldn't be more different than that.
In essence, a hackathon is a gathering of people, split into teams, each focused on solving a problem, over a relatively short period of time (usually 24-48h). The first hackathons date back to the open-source community in the late 90s, and were used as a way of fast-tracking important changes to open-source software.
These early hackathons were invite-only, focused on writing code with no frills. However, now the term hackathon is used much more loosely with companies all over the world using them as a means to foster better problem-solving, increased collaboration and overcome technical challenges.
Our first hackathon
Origin actually got started at a Hackathon in October 2014.
We were known as “Youbond” back then… terrible name, I know! We spent a weekend holed up in the old Google Campus in Old Street. In hindsight we didn’t really embrace the whole open hackathon vibe, we just turned up, presented our idea, refused anyone who was interested in helping us and used it as an opportunity to focus on building an impressive prototype and meeting potential investors.
We actually met our first investors at the closing pitch event… shout out to Greg Rogers and Techstars!
Shaking things up
I’m always amazed at just how much you’re able to achieve when you focus the mind, block out distractions, and change context.
Sometimes all you need is to shake things up a little. I’ve often observed over the years that even when working with outstanding technical talent, sometimes when trying to crack a really tough problem, you just need a different approach, untainted by previous attempts.
So many times in the early days when engineers would give up, or tell me that something was impossible, I’d revisit the problem with another engineer a few weeks later and invariably achieve great solutions.
Making an impact
I came up with the idea of doing hackathons at Origin as I found that during my day-to-day I'd take note of challenging technical problems that could be hugely impactful on our business.
However, due to their open-ended nature and a never ending short-term todo list, we’d rarely focus resources on trying to crack them. Every so often I'd come up with a solution, often in the shower! I then had an epiphany, incredibly obvious in hindsight, that we should be using our world-class team of engineers, product designers, product managers, testers etc to solve these rather than just me.
Revolutionising our offering
At Origin we typically hold our hackathons once a year. This cadence gives us the time to identify burning problems that, if solved, have the potential to revolutionise our product offering.
We often, but not always, like to have business development representatives embedded into the teams to provide the client context and ensure we’re not going off-piste. We’ve held 4 hackathons so far at Origin, and I’d estimate that probably 75% of the problems we’ve tackled have ended up in production, often after a lot more work.
A simple technique that I’ve found incredibly effective over the years to get 110% out of my engineering teams during hackathons – I preface the hackathon problems with the fact that they’re very hard problems and that they might simply be too hard for them to solve…
Hackathons might not be commonplace in the world of finance, but at Origin we have found them extremely powerful and rewarding. They also happen to be a lot of fun!