2022 Hack week @Twitter: Being a team captain as a junior designer
This week at Twitter was hack week! It was an incredible experience and I want to share what it was like being the team captain of my teams’ project as a junior designer.
My first hackathon experience
Before I jump into to the subject of this article I want to share how I got into hackathons. Almost a year ago I took part in my very first hackathon which was a 48-hour competition, it happened virtually and globally during the pandemic. Ideas were pitched on a Slack channel and everyone was teaming up with someone they had never met before. We had teammates from different time zones based in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Our team came second place in our category and we won some money for our PoC. A week later I was sent a message on LinkedIn asking if I would be interested in joining Twitter as a Junior designer. As part of the interview process, I had to do a presentation showing a project I did. I decided to show this project and I landed the job!
My first company team project hack week
A few months into the job I got a taster of what a hack week was like but it was just within the team of the product I was working on at the time. My team was very small, and I mean very small it was just me and my friend in the team who was a PM intern. We shared our idea with people who we knew outside of our products team which helped us to develop our proposed idea without having an engineer onboard. We showed a prototype on Figma and a presentation that showed the team what we were capable of.
My first company wide hack week
2022, an announcement was made that there will be a company wide hack week. We were told to put up ideas into a spreadsheet but I was little a bit worried that no one would be interested in my idea. So, I wrote on slack what my idea was and as I was developing the concept, sharing design mockups, the DMs started coming in. I decided to put it on the spreadsheet. Every person who got in touch with me was passionate about NFTs and joined the team. The great thing about this company is how global it is, I recruited people from around the globe. I had to come up with a plan of how a team living on opposite sides of the world could work together so I reached out to people in my department and jotted down some tips. I created a slack channel for our team, prepared as much material for our team members in the east side of the world to get started on the project for hack week since they would begin earlier than everyone else and setup 2 meetings for every day of the hack week that could work for the team mates in the east and west side of the world. Luckily I was in the middle of the timezones so I could attend both meetings.
However, just before hack week I lost a couple team members as they had other commitments. I was understanding but it didn’t felt like a good start. But the world works in mysterious ways and on the first day of hack week I gained 2 valuable members. My team had a couple PMs, a senior designer, a researcher and 4 ENGINEERS! I couldn’t believe that I could get this many people to believe in my idea about NFTs.
On the first day of hack week, I created a fig jam as an ice breaker and it worked surprisingly well. It was just a bunch of questions asking people about their interest in this NFTs space and what they wanted to get out of hack week. During the week, we collaborated as equal partners sharing all kinds of idea to develop this project and shared our knowledge about NFTs. After every meeting I would write a summary of the changes, what people were working on and made loom videos of the development of the designs. I found that communicating async as much as possible that helped with managing the different timezones plus I made sure everyone had editor access to the Figma designs and by making loom videos people could give feedback at any point in the video.
On the last day of hack week, we put all our work into a Google drive and did a demo video showing coded prototypes! We shared what the problem/ need on the platform was, gave our hypothesis, explained the concept, the technicalities and the future vision. In sharing with people in our virtual booth i.e. Google meets, the feedback we had gotten was overwhelmingly positive. We even heard that someone liked it so much they watched our demo twice!
What is next?
In the coming week projects submitted for the hack week will be judged and may even come to existence one day. Even though it would be really nice to be one of the winners, I think the people in my team used hack week as a learning opportunity and so did I. I learnt how to collaborate with different partners who were also in different time zones, understood how people in different positions outside of design worked, learnt about NFTs and met some incredibly talented people who made this idea even more amazing than I had ever imagined.
If you have read this article up until the end that’s amazing! I just felt like writing about my experience and share what having a junior designer could bring to the table.
