Hack Days
What?
Starting in 2020, the technology team at Rapha will spend 2 days per quarter (TBC) working on side innovative projects.
Why?
To benefit Rapha and our customers as well as the technology team in order to acquire new skills, foster creativity and work with state-of-the-art technologies.
How?
The technology/digital product team will engage with other teams at Rapha trying to identify issues, crazy ideas that haven’t been put into practice yet due to a lack of time/resources or any quick wins that can leverage technology in order to add value to Rapha and improve our customers' experience online or at the clubhouses.
The expected outcome of those conversations is a list of ideas that can be classified in the four strategic themes for the new fiscal year shared by the Leadership Team during the last company update:
- Basics in place
- Creativity & Innovation (e.g. quick wins to get revenue leveraging content, design, etc)
- Digital Backbone
- Culture & Values
Before the end of the quarter, those ideas will be reviewed by a panel (TBC) and the best idea will be worked one during 2 full days (TBC) by the technology team.
When?
This will happen on a quarterly basis, and at the end of the quarter the technology team will spend 2 days working on the best idea like a Hackathon.
Outcomes
The ideal outcome is to produce an MVP or at least the core of an MVP that can be added to our backlog in order to improve it iteratively until it's ready to be shipped, anyway there would be a short presentation at the end of the final day where the team would present their findings, this could be the start of that month's end of month drinks.
Ground rules
Although the team is free to participate in this activity, there are some ground rules that we must stick to in order to keep supporting the business.
In order to be able to participate in the Innovation Sessions, we need to define some basic ground rules to make sure the team make the most of them while supporting the business.
- It applies for full-time staff, contractors excluded.
- This is not mandatory, people can choose to keep working on BAU tasks.
- Initially, one team member per craft (FE,BE/MW, DevOps, BA, QA) will be “on-call” during the sessions.
- A rota will be created to that end and agreed by the team ahead of the Innovation Friday.
- Based on the bug severity scale, if a Highest priority bug is detected during the sessions, the “on-call team” will pause their innovation activities and work together on analysing the incident.
- If the issue is, for instance, clearly BE related with no other crafts involved, then just the BE “on-call team” member will work on the issue initially, although requesting help from other team members if needed.
- Once the issue has been solved, the team member(s) will continue with the innovation activities. If the issue is complex enough that requires working on it for most of the day, then the team member(s) involved won’t be in the rota for 2 months in a row.